Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia; Sriram Viswanathan, Intel; John Chapin,
Vanu; Tren Griffin, MSFT

"Wireless Frontier"

Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

July 8, 2003

Supernova Conference

Washington DC

--

Tren Griffin:

MSFT is very interested in mesh wireless. It's a major area of
research at MSFT Research, which isn't product development, it's
basic R&D. Why wireless mesh? We believe in decentralization,
power at the edge.

Bob Metcalfe says that 1-2% of the chips produced every year are
part of the Internet. The other 98% are not networked. As they
come online, you get a Metcalfe's Law effect.

In order to get billions of chips to talk to each other, we need
to invent a new way.

There is no single solution to this, but mesh is an important
part.

This is important in respect of the cost of bandwidth.

Another piece of this is pre-cacheing, predictively cacheing
stuff you think you'll want. Bandwidth has diffferent costs to
deliver a megabyte -- $800 on cellular voice, $4 for cellular
data. $4 is better, but if you had a camphone that was smart
enough to hold off on sending its pic at $4/MB until it got to a
WiFi AP that was free. You might pay $4 in some contexts, and
nothing in others.

--

Sriram:

There's no viable business model for WiFi hotspots. 2 T-Mobile
Starbucks users/store/month. That's not a business.

--

John:

There are two fundamental constraints:

1. Minutes in the day

2. Budgets

No one will spend $80/month on cellular and add $80/month for
sending photos by camera. This is why WiFi is broken. Look at
Korea and Japan: lower the price of DSL and adoption goes up.

--

Marco:

There isn't a split between professional and personal users. An
architect at a site may watch his employers' nickels, but spend
$4/MB to flirt.

--

Sriram:

There is a use-case: WiFi starts in the enterprise [ed: *cough*
bullshit *cough*]. People who have WiFi from the office use WiFi
to get back into the enterprise.

--

John:

WiFi doesn't have to have the same bizmodel as cellular. Maybe
it's like parking: some places offer free parking as an
enticement, some places charge, some places make it an amenity
for guests.

--

Tren:

Everything is limited by spectrum. The FCC is looking at enabling
the public to use unused UHF TV spectrum.

Tren: it's important that your device not only be smart about
what spectrum it uses, it also has to be smart about your
preferences. When you get to a Starbucks, it should synch your
data at $0.25/MB instead of using your cellular $4/MB. The
use-case for WiFi at Starbucks isn't surfing.

--

Marco:

The skills of Museum Designers will be in great demand (to help
people understand where the WiFi is) in the coming days.

--