On Saturday 16 December 2006 11:36, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
On 16/12/06 10:59 +0530, jtd wrote:
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The experiment at HBCSE proved conclusively that capital costs are very low. Caveat upstream has to be cheap and profits would be near zero.
How scalable was that network? Capital costs are low for any small network, but opex is relatively high.
Opex is high with current business model. The wifi network is a DIY non-business.
Can you show me how it would scale upto a few thousand nodes?
Eat the pudding test: In my experience bw drops to 4 mbps and stays there with a 54Mbps AP for 10 to 20 users (havent tried higher). Latency increases though, but not by much. And we are talking of fat pipes for tens of nodes. According to Fred pook, the city of Dharamstala is fully covered by wifi - afaik 1000 nodes. However Scalability to this size will definetly be a problem. But scalability to lets say 3 to 4 nodes with one 10mbps pipe per cluster, and 30 users per node. Should give u good performance. We are talking of rural and semiurban areas with poor phone penetration.
The problem in ISPs isn't one of bandwidth (that becomes cheaper per unit as you buy more), it's one of getting a reliable internal network which scales cheaply.
Having said the above. Cellular and land networks are almost ubiquitos in India. And a wireless infrastructre would be an non lucarative business (given prevalent business models for content, voice and live media), but would help in providing competition the same way as libre software has. Note libre software provides several viable business models. One would have to think deeply about possible business models for such disruptive wireless networks.