ROI / Business Model for Outdoor Networks Category Archives

December 20, 2006

Clever Outdoor Wireless Partnerships Deliver Mobility For Business

On last Wednesday's 12/13/06 Live Broadcast of Mobility TV, Chris Kozup talked about using wireless outside during our Now You Can segment. Chris said, "Now you can hold your staff meetings in the park on a beautiful spring day using outdoor wireless access rather than sitting in a stuffy conference room without windows.”

Those of us behind the scenes busily answering viewer questions laughed and said, “Yes, we’re ready for springtime! We want to go outside to answer Mobility TV viewer questions rather than sit in this stuffy, windowless conference room.” Today, we can easily move outdoors. Wireless mesh has made that possible!

Outdoor wireless access is no longer limited to within 300 feet of a wired port. With wireless mesh, outdoor access can be deployed anywhere with line of site between mesh access points and power (street lights, traffic signals, etc.). Only one mesh access point needs to be wired into the network, all of the other mesh access points send and receive data via a wireless backhaul (Cisco Launches City-Wide Outdoor Wireless 'Mesh' Solution).

Outdoor wireless can now be pervasively deployed. And companies, cities, public agencies, and service providers are working together to come up with clever ways to bring outdoor wireless to their local regions, for example.....

Today, I presented our outdoor wireless mesh solution to an enterprise customer that wants to work with their local service provider to deploy an outdoor wireless mesh solution in their city. The enterprise company will help fund the outdoor wireless mesh network. In exchange, they’ll get full access for their mobile employees and the service provider will be able to offer wireless access to other companies, city agencies, and the public. The service provider will own and maintain the network.

This city-wide outdoor wireless mesh network is being driven by the enterprise company because it sees a need for outdoor wireless to meet it’s business requirements for employee mobility – indoors and outdoors. This clever partnership will be a win-win for the company, the service provider, the city, and the public.

Companies and cities are starting to see the return on investment (ROI) of outdoor wireless access to increase employee productivity, enable real-time workflows, and improve customer service. They’re also looking to outdoor wireless networks for support of a variety of Wi-Fi enabled devices - beyond laptops and PDAs - such as parking meters, gas/water meters, alarms, field service devices, and security cameras.

Client security is not an issue with an outdoor wireless mesh network because companies can use Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA2 via a secure AAA backend server set up by the service provider or open access with VPN back to their internal network.

I’m ready to go outside and work! Are you?

Yes, come springtime, don’t be surprised if your Mobility TV question is answered by the Cisco Mobility team as we sit outdoors in the sunshine sipping an iced latte. Since we are all wireless, you don’t need to know where we are …… as long as we get our job done.

Tune in to Mobility TV the 2nd Wednesday of every month at 10:00 AM PT. It’s LIVE and FREE!! The next broadcast is Wednesday, January 10, 2007.

Mobility TV offers informative interviews with mobility experts, authorities, and business leaders in a dynamic, television-style format. Questions can be submitted to our wireless experts at anytime throughout the broadcast and answers are posted live to all viewers.

http://www.cisco.com/go/mobilitytv

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July 06, 2006

Personal Stocks and (Rock Solid) Wireless Bonds

On the topic of "payback" I'll mention a personal anecdote and say a few words about Cisco's focus on wireless as a critical business capabilitiy.

It's not until you lose something, even temporarily, that you realize how valuable it is. My wife and I rely on wireless at home and we go virtually apoplectic when it stops working. A few weeks ago I was making a carefully timed stock trade over breakfast and my wireless connection went down right in the middle of the transaction. I spent ten minutes fiddling our (consumer) access point and tearing my hair out to get it running again. By the time it was back up I lost $300 on the trade.

Moral of the story? Never try to time the stock market. And...make sure your wireless network is rock solid if you're betting your business on it :)

I recently spoke with Oisin McAlasdair, one of the guys managing Cisco IT's internal unified upgrade. There will be 6000 unified access points spread across 400 buildings worldwide with 300 controllers managing them. Why bother with such a major upgrade?

It's not that Cisco's existing autonomous network is deficient. We've been using it for five years, with fifty thousand daily users. In a recent study of twenty five thousand Cisco employees forty two percent claim that the WLAN is their only method for accessing the network and each person gains an average of 1.5 hours of productive time a day using wireless.

As with many new technologies, it's the organization playing catch-up with its people. In this case Cisco recognizes wireless as a business critical network and not just a convenience. A simple outage across even a small number of access points can cause man-days or weeks of lost productive time.

There are a number of reasons to upgrade the network to unified (I'll leave the marketing to other venues). But, it's the right strategy for Cisco and it'll be the right strategy for many other organizations as they come to see wireless as a critical business capability. Day trading over breakfast is one thing, but keeping fifty thousand employees productive is quite another.

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April 16, 2006

The ROI for outdoor WiFi access

Wireless cellular networks have been driven by large capital expenditures on infrastructure and then clients are subsidized to get users on to the network with a well known return on investment (ROI). The emergence of WiFi technology has shifted this paradigm just that we now have a wave of unsubsidized unlicensed WiFi clients driving the demand for infrastructure with an unclear ROI. When we founded Airespace, the ROI for wireless networking in the enterprise was not clear either cut but the waves of clients from the consumer space were demanding the same mobility they had found so convenient in their homes to be in their work space, forcing enterprise IT managers to effectively become wireless ISPs. Once established in the work space, the productivity of wireless mobility became clear and measurable. As we watch WiFi technology emerge from the laptop in to other platforms such as cell phones, PDAs and your kid’s portable play stations we will see this growing wave of WiFi clients demanding WiFi access in the outdoor space. And while people are searching for the return on investment (ROI) and business model to justify these outdoor WiFi mesh networks, we will see the same productivity increases that wireless mobility brought to the indoor enterprise space in combination with the increasing wave of WiFi clients across new platforms make outdoor WiFi access an increasing a more common place and the ROI more obvious.

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