Internet Load Balancers are hardware deviceS which includes network ports for Internet connections to be aggregated and used for Load Balancing and Bonded Internet solutions (Bonded ADSL and Bonded VPN).

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Ten thousand is an arbitrary place to put a stick in the sand, but significant nonetheless: The milestone of 10,000 McDonald’s wired up–a few hundred have back access only, due to being stores within WalMart centers–is a vindication of Wayport’s long-term strategy, dating back to 2004. Wayport switched at that point from a slightly more public-faced, public-access company to one that understood that back-office operations could be just as valuable, if less sexy, than front-facing consumer networks. Dan Lowden, Wayport’s long-time marketing and business development chief, said yesterday, “In a lot of these venues, the back office comes first. The Wi-Fi public access for some is a big priority, but for others it’s a nice to have, great thing to have, but the priority is the back office.”

Although several other quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s lack any comprehensive Wi-Fi plan–Burger King, Wendy’s, and Subway to name three of the largest–Wayport is locked out of working with direct competitors. This opens the potential for another firm to handle a several-thousand-location network. Wayport has worked with both McDonald’s corporate-owned stores (about 2/3rds of stores in the U.S.), as well as reaching out to franchisees, who Lowden noted pay a predetermined flat rate for the service via McDonald’s. “It’s made them incredibly efficient to be able to offer this to their franchisees at one price, instead of variable pricing,” he noted. Wayport acts as the layer between various telecom providers, applications and services, and the stores.

Wayport provides several kinds of back-office services, although credit-card processing was the first thing htey rolled out. They’ve extended to remote video feeds for security, Redbox DVD rental systems that are found in some McDonald’s, and kiosks used for job applications. Lowden said Wayport offers things as straightforward but critical as a dial-up fail-safe when a broadband connection drops.

Wayport also manages AT&T’s hotspot network, which puts them in the unwiring seat for the 7,000-odd Starbucks stores that will converted from T-Mobile to AT&T service during 2008. Wayport was once the clear leader in the hotspot builder market, with T-Mobile in the second position. Now, Wayport will be operating through a direct contract or management agreement over 18,000 hotspots in the U.S.; T-Mobile will likely be the second biggest with a couple thousand locations (Borders and FedEx/Kinko’s tops among them). The No. 3 player is hard to figure. Panera?

I’ve been predicting for some time that media on the edge–music, videos, movies, and games stored on servers on the local Wi-Fi network–will be the next big development in venue-oriented Wi-Fi, with Starbucks likely far in the lead. Lowden wouldn’t comment on any specific plans in the works, of course, but said generally, “Storing and caching all that content on the edge…hasn’t been leveraged in the past, but it will be in the future to create a very unique experience.” At Barnes & Noble, Wayport caches some multimedia data that’s available to customers in the stores.

The advantage for in-store media storage is that you can leverage the speed of the local network, and add additional access points to distribute network load. The choke point is no longer the Internet connection, but local network speed. I expect–though Wayport, AT&T, and Starbucks haven’t said it–that Starbucks infrastructure will be all 802.11n for this reason, likely with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz support for the best throughput in the higher-frequency band for media transactions. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could only buy movies via 5 GHz.)

Lowden also noted that the proliferation of mobile devices with Wi-Fi built in have led to them reaching out to venues that wouldn’t have made sense for them to work with previously, and for unlikely candidates to reach out to them, too. Wayport is now working with a number of healthcare facilities that, while they have their own network infrastructure, wanted to outsource public access Wi-Fi (whether they choose to charge or underwrite it), and certain applications that they’re not as experienced with running themselves.

A little history: In 2001 and again in 2004, the heat seemed to be on the public side of Wi-Fi: lots of money to be made, ostensibly, lots of partnerships and venues to be built, and an overcrowded supply of infrastructure builders. The year before, Wayport looked to be an also-ran in the hotspot provider business.

Despite being one of the earliest firms to put Ethernet and then Wi-Fi into hotels, and build out hotspots in airports; and despite their survival of the first hotspot meltdown in 2001 during the dotcom crash and brief venture capital shortage; and despite their early entrance into allowing wholesale pricing for hotspot aggregators; the firm seemed about to be eclipsed by apparently deep-pocketed Cometa (with AT&T, IBM, and Intel in various capital and support roles), Toshiba’s mom-and-pop focused turnkey system, and T-Mobile, which had the Starbucks contract. What a difference a year makes.

Cometa, Toshiba, and Wayport contended for the contract to build out back-office and public-access service at McDonald’s in the U.S., and Wayport won. Within a few weeks, Toshiba passed its few hundred locations to Cometa, which shut its doors in May 2004. Wayport, meanwhile, had cooked up a strategy for McDonald’s that it announced later that month.

Their approach involved a fixed-rate charged for unlimited access by retail network partners for all the locations in their pool. This meant that partners had a fixed cost, instead of a per-session cost, and Wayport could obtain specific revenue even before usage by a partner ramped up. Wayport hasn’t discussed the details of this arrangement in depth since, but has partnered with Sony with its Mylo, Nintendo with its DS game player, and ZipIt with its wireless messaging appliance.

The McDonald’s deal also apparently gave Wayport a way to extend its work with SBC-later-AT&T; Wayport had earlier in 2004 became the managed-services contractor for SBC to build out The UPS Store/Mailboxes Etc. nationwide. (UPS dropped AT&T as its partner in mid-2007, although that didn’t appear to have anything to do with Wayport’s role.)

AT&T through Wayport developed its large resold/managed footprint that incorporated resale of Wayport’s McDonald’s locations with the UPS Store and a few hundred other managed locations, including a handful of airports. The Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless put more airports in SBC’s hands, too. (SBC was once the 60 percent majority owner of Cingular; when SBC and BellSouth, the other owner, merged that put the newly rebranded AT&T in charge of Cingular which it relabeled as AT&T. Confusing, huh?)

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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A Miami Beach reader noted my Florida links yesterday, and wondered why that city’s $5m IBM network isn’t live: The network contracted was awarded in 2006, completed 6 months ago, and the reader can get great signal strength. But no Internet feed. Anyone in Miami Beach know?

The brilliant xkcd comic takes it to the next step: Wireless zero config? Try overzealous wireless config.

Microwave oven may have disrupted reader’s Wi-Fi: Rob Pegoraro over at the Washington Post notes that a friend of his discovered through the process of elimination that his microwave oven was acting as a big interferer with his Wi-Fi network. The oven in question eventually started smoking and burned itself out, and its removal resulted in the network working fine. All microwave ovens produce low-intensity 2.4 GHz radio waves when in use; they don’t leak the high-intensity signals that are reflected to agitate water molecules and heat food. But Wi-Fi uses such low signal strength to encode data that microwave ovens can be enough of an interferer to slow networks down. They won’t cook you though, unless you crawl inside and close the door.

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Out-of-sight, out-of-mesh: PacketHop announces first 802.11s mesh standard products based on the likely-to-be-approved current draft. The mesh standard is about endpoints, and I’d entirely lost track of it; it has nothing to do with how metro-scale devices mesh way up on poles. 802.11s mesh should allow end-point devices to form their own loose associations, which could improve throughput and range across parts of a network. Latency increases when you have a mesh network, because devices require more hops to reach a gateway, but depending on how smart meshes are about tokens and limiting power, they can exchange data at higher speeds among themselves without a central chokepoint. PacketHop, acquired by SRI International, is offering their technology as something hardware makers can integrate, rather than as a set of chips or a reference product.

Stalled-Fi in Florida: The Sun Sentinal newspaper looks at stalled, dropped efforts at city-wide Wi-Fi in Palm Beach County. Boynton Beach had a network early on, in 2005, but the city dropped the operator in March 31 due to complaints over maintenance. Delray Beach (E-Path) and West Palm Beach haven’t advanced.

Minneapolis Wi-Fi requires booster for best use: This isn’t an enormous surprise, or anything, and one of the consultants on the Minneapolis project said that USI Wireless starts with the notion that a booster is needed, which is highly sensible. Reporter Steve Alexander found service was highly variable outdoors with a standard laptop Wi-Fi adapter. The company sells boosters: a $160 high-gain laptop card and an $80 ($5/mo rental) home bridge. Alexander didn’t re-test problem areas with the high-gain card. You can see the map of Alexander’s test locations.

Orange Line in Los Angeles can’t attract Wi-Fi operator: A spokesperson suggested riders should take advantage of “existing satellite” providers, where I think he’ll be red-faced to know he should have said cellular. Or the reporter misheard. Say satellite and cellular each ten times fast. Now drink a glass of water.

Scarborough (Yorkshire Coast, UK) offers free Wi-Fi: 5.5m visitors pass through this coastal town each year, and a local business association has decided to unleash free Wi-Fi. The service will be pointed outwards for boats in the harbor, as well as inland.

Free Wi-Fi float in Sebastopol parade: The Apple Blossom Festival Parade last Saturday included “a fluorescent and sparkle-clad crew that shouted, ‘Free Wi-Fi.’ ” The parade was led by a 1906 San Francisco Earthquake survivor.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Oh give me a break, really. I don’t believe it. Rediff reported that Indian wireless connections had crossed that of American subscriber base. Where do they come out with these magic figures from? I am not getting any confirmation from the number of the handsets sold and neither there seems to be any independent verification. […]

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This article in New York Times details the “evangelist” for Nokia trying to design cell phones for the third world. It swells my heart with pride and joy that the author has considered India as the third world. I am sure that those nationalists who swear by conspiracy theories would bleat with happiness that we […]

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I dont work for any company and I would truly appreciate if I dont get any queries for Broadband companies or connections. Thanks!No tag for this post. Related posts No related posts.

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The Big Easy gets a big loss with EarthLink’s pullout: InformationWeek reports that EarthLink attempted to sell the network, get the city to buy it, and then to simply give the network (and its obligations) away, but had no takers on any front.

EarthLink announced its most recent quarter’s earnings a few days ago, and they managed to turn a GAAP profit, while staunching the bleeding of so many businesses that had no short-term and seemingly little medium-term potential for net revenue. The company dramatically slashed its marketing, which they found only caused subscribers to join and quit. While revenue dropped from $290m to $235m year over year in Q1, operating costs and expenses were cut from $321m to $198m, with the most noticeable drop in sales and marketing ($99m to $31m) and operations and customer support ($60m to $39m). They recorded $58m in earnings versus a year ago’s $22m loss.

Employees dropped from 2,108 to 922 during the period, while subscribers dropped from 5.7m to 3.6m. But it’s worth noting that the biggest drop happened last year already: the 31-Dec-2007 subscriber count was 3.9m. They’re making slightly more money from each of those remaining customers, and have slightly lower churn. Their municipal write-off is lower, too, as they’ve taken most of the expense, and have offloaded more and more of their future obligations.

The company still has the same problem that it had before it started unwinding its services beyond dial-up and broadband: None of its markets are expanding, and it has increasingly poor access to reasonably priced broadband to resell to customers, as no cable or DSL providers are obligated to provide true wholesale rates.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Although a San Antonio PR guy spotted the AT&T trucks at a Starbucks last week, this press release makes it official: AT&T and Starbucks co-announced today that San Antonio–AT&T’s corporate HQ town–is the first city to be unwired with AT&T’s flavor of Wi-Fi in Starbucks stores. Other markets will follow this year, although, as before, there’s no list of markets nor a time table beyond the notion that “it will continue through 2008.”

The companies also said that AT&T high-speed DSL and fiber customers will gain free access at 7,000 Starbucks starting May 1, but as other eagle-eyed readers have noted, that option is already available on any T-Mobile login page that anyone’s written me about or I’ve seen. The difference will be that a separate SSID called ATTWiFi will be available as an option for network selection, presenting a different gateway page.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Starbucks entertainment senior VP “left” the company today; its CTO subsumes the entertainment function: If you were wondering if Starbucks might provide even clearer signals about its future plans regarding in-store entertainment and its deal with AT&T to take over providing Wi-Fi services and back-end operations, today’s brief announcement speaks volumes. Chris Bruzzo, the company’s chief technology office, will add the entertainment group’s functions to his current purview. This doesn’t surprise me after speaking with Bruzzo two months when the AT&T deal was announced. (A few details from that talk.)

When I talked to Bruzzo, he was clearly focused on how to improve the culture of the stores, with technology being one tool. He talked about connectivity being “a core part of the Starbucks experience” (that’s Experience with a [tm]), and that he wanted Starbucks customers to be able to “tell stories” about coffee, music, and other things. That implies a kind of online medium for discussion and interaction that doesn’t yet exist, but that is more likely to happen with Bruzzo’s expanded role.

Bruzzo had already tipped me to the fact that Starbucks has caching media servers in its stores; that’s how the Starbucks iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store combination technology works with iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPod touch in the several markets in which that’s offered. (Those plans never advanced much after the initial launch, by the way: Seattle, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area got service, but Chicago and Los Angeles are still listed as “coming soon,” and other metropolitan areas are now “by the end of 2008,” which would tie in neatly with Starbucks’ other plans.)

With caching servers, content is pushed to the edge. Retrieving a 2 GB movie from iTunes thus becomes a matter of a few minutes to a laptop (or even faster if 802.11n networks are being deployed by AT&T), rather than 30 to 120 minutes over a typical home broadband connection. Stop in to Starbucks and fill up–with media. Neat, huh?

Back in February, Bruzzo described how the company has a unique relationship with its customers, who are already bringing their digital lifestyle into the stores, allowing hyper-local conversations to take place. “Starbucks is uniquely positioned to provide that kind of very local opportunity. It’s what we do. The beginning of that is what we do today when we curate music, and books.” The new AT&T relationship, he said, “gives us a landscape to continue to experiemnt with those kinds of things even at a local level.”

As for the kinds of devices used, “We shouldn’t be limited in our thoughts about connected devices to just communications devices; they should be PSPs [PlayStation Portables] and cameras.” I expect that we will see a lot of change, much of workshopped in Seattle-area stores, in the digital side of Starbucks this year.

I will also repeat my expectation that the launch of a 3G iPhone will involve a Starbucks tie-in, and that the date for the first Starbucks AT&T markets to go live with AT&T in charge will coincide with the release of the 3G iPhone. The timing is too close to be coincidental. (Rumors today are that the 3G iPhone will be announced at the June 9 developers conference that Apple runs. I’ll be at that event’s keynote.)

Bruzzo has been with the company for not much over a year, coming off a few years as head of communications (talking, not technology) at Amazon. In January 2008, he was boosted to chief technology and chief information officer, as well as being appointed a vice president. That’s a pretty fast rise; he must have, you know, a few good ideas. He’s behind My Starbucks Idea, the site the company is using to let its customers give it free, valuable advice. One of the fascinating, Cluetrained elements of that site is the transparency: ideas that are submitted can be viewed by other visitors to the site, and voted upon. Suggestion boxes are usually locked tight, whether in the real world or on the Net. Some posts have thousands of votes and hundreds of comments.

Today’s announcement also included a note that Starbucks is selling its Hear Music division to its partner in the venture, Concord Music Group. Hear signed Paul McCartney among other musicians; Starbucks will keep working with Concord, so this might not be quite as big a change in direction as a change in its internal focus. This is yet another move of many by company head Howard Schultz, who took charge of the firm again, and started getting rid of top executives, reorganizing divisions, and making announcements about massive changes in the stores, notably replacing its barista-hiding super-automated coffeemakers with shorter, more controllable systems, and tearing out the stinking breakfast sandwich ovens.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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