« BT Fusion Will Have 20 Phones with Wi-Fi | Main | Lithuania Launches Hotspots »

October 17, 2005

Ireland with 50 Base Stations

By Glenn Fleishman

Ireland Offline needs a new spokesperson: John Timmons, the broadband advocacy group’s talking head, said in this article that all of Ireland could be served by just 50 mobile WiMax base stations using technology that should be available by 2008.

The article has other problems, mostly from uninformed opinions quoted directly. For instance, on Philadelphia:

“The local authority was going to set it up themselves but didn’t have the technical knowledge,” said Stephen McCormack, alliances director with Bitbuzz, an Irish wi-fi provider. “They had to contract private companies to do it for them. This increased the costs of the project and will make it more expensive for consumers.”

Oddly, EarthLink’s winning bid a few weeks ago requires the company to cover all expense and meet the proposal’s pricing structure. As far as I know, Philadelphia always planned to contract this out, too.

The article does bring out a usual complain that’s been hampering the growth of competitive wireless networks: putting up masts (or poles) on which to mount antennas. Real estate rights remain a key challenge in metropolitan-scale deployments.

Posted by Glennf at October 17, 2005 3:18 PM

Categories: hotspots, municipal networks

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:

Comments

Post a comment