Broadband Wi-Fi war looms

[silver_corolla]

Broadband Wi-Fi war looms
(Manila Standard Today, Chin Wong)

A Wi-Fi war is about to break out, bringing broadband Internet services to residential users for as low as P900 a month.

On one side of the war is telecommunications giant Smart Communications Inc., which plans to make its extensive network of cell sites do double duty by beaming Wi-Fi signals to homes.

On the other side is an intriguing upstart, Wi-Fi Ng Bayan, which aims to use novel technology to provide faster and cheaper service, and disperse ownership of the network to hundreds of community entrepreneurs.

Last week, Smart began offering its Wi-Fi service on its Web site, promising residential users up to 128 kilobits per second (kbps), or about twice the speed of dial-up connections for P998 a month, with a promotional rate of P788 during a three-month introductory period.

At the same time, however, Wi-Fi Ng Bayan was setting up its network in six Valle Verde subdivisions in Pasig City, offering residential subscribers a much faster 2 megabits per second (mbps) — about 15 times faster than Smart — for P900 a month. Subscribers get one month free, while the company does stress- testing on the system.

The company is also testing a Voice over Internet Protocol service with Eastern Telecom, which has provided Wi-Fi Ng Bayan with an E1 connection to the Internet for testing. The company also has a service agreement with PCCW Ltd., Hong Kong’s biggest communications provider.

Similar but different

Both providers work on the principle of beaming Wi-Fi signals to homes equipped with external antennas, but Wi-Fi Ng Bayan has added a number of technological enhancements that gives it the edge, says the company’s managing director George Royeca.

Unlike traditional Wi-Fi deployments that use two-radio systems such as Internet hotspots, Wi-Fi Ng Bayan uses multiradio access points — designed to its specification by Siemens — that enable it to offer much higher speeds.

“A two-radio system can be used for a metropolitan deployment but it doesn’t solve the bandwidth requirement,” Royeca says. In two-radio system, he says, one radio is used to distribute the wireless signal while the other is used for backhaul, which means to receive the Internet signal and retransmit it.

“If you give one person two jobs, his efficiency goes down,” Royeca says. “So as you move down several hops, the speed goes down until you run out of bandwidth. We deploy a multiradio system with every radio doing a certain task — one for distribution, one to receive the signal, and one to retransmit it, so our backhaul is very stable.”

Another differentiator is that Wi-Fi Ng Bayan uses a meshed network, which means that each access point communicates with the next and can act as a repeater to extend the range and strength of the signal (see box).

It’s unclear if Smart uses the same approach or uses the more traditional hub-and-spoke, where one wired line is attached to an access point to distribute a signal over a limited radius.

Smart offers its Wi-Fi service through its subsidiary, Meridian Telekoms Inc. No officials from either company were available, however, to give more details about their Wi-Fi service.

Ramon Isberto, Smart spokesperson, says the company is launching the service first in the provinces.

Community patrons

Unlike a traditional telco,Wi-Fi Ng Bayan wants to distribute ownership of the network and the revenue it generates to hundreds of entrepreneurs that it calls “community patrons” who will take care of recruiting customers in their respective neighborhoods and take 25 percent of the gross revenue earned. The company will also require community patrons — who must put up P250,000 — to offer free bandwidth on off-peak hours to schools in poorer, neighboring communities.

“Right now, we’re just setting up at Valle Verde and we’re talking about proof of concept, but once it works, since it’s modular, it’s not hard to deploy,” says Carmelo Royeca, the company’s CEO and George’s father. “Imagine a situation where a group of businessmen in a small town in say, Sultan Kudarat, decide to set up something like this and we replicate this in hundreds of these kinds of communities. At the end of the day, there’s no sovereign debt — this will all be funded by private individuals. This is the micro-entrepreneurship the government is trying to encourage.”

He adds that the same model of revenue-sharing has worked in other industries, particularly in agriculture.

Nitty-gritty

While the elder Royeca talks of the big picture, George looks after the nitty-gritty, including the local manufacture of external antennas that will cost about P1,500. A Wi-Fi card, on the other hand, will cost about P1,000 and connect a home PC directly to the external antenna.

“This is a fixed wireless system,” George explains. “It’s not really mobile.”

Home users can take the signal and use a wireless router to share it with others in the same house, however.

“We’re giving you 2 mbps. However you want to use that is up to you. If you want to put a wireless router and propagate it to 10 computers, we don’t mind.”

[Innova_Boy]

Wow, this is so great but malayo kami sa pasig, i hope this lives up to it's commitment of providing 2Mbps signal and not only like 256kbps of meridian/ Smart wi-fi...

WBR,

[KALAMPAG]

Wow. Very promising. Not until we hear other's side of course. Surely others will join the bandwagon.

OT:
After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year, Japanese scientists
found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years, and came to the
conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one
thousand years ago.

In the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200 metres and
headlines in the US papers read:

"US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibres, and
have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech
digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Japanese".

One week later, a Filipino newspaper reported the following:

"After digging as deep as 500 metres, Filipino scientists have found
absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their
ancestors were already using wireless technology".

--
"faith is just another lame excuse for failures"
-- Gary Hobson

[EL Chicane]

In terms of broadband internet, Wi-Fi is just a transition technology. The real wireless broadband coming up is Wi-Max. Read about that.

[creepy]

Wow. Very promising. Not until we hear other's side of course. Surely others will join the bandwagon.

OT:
After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year, Japanese scientists
found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years, and came to the
conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one
thousand years ago.

In the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200 metres and
headlines in the US papers read:

"US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibres, and
have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech
digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Japanese".

One week later, a Filipino newspaper reported the following:

"After digging as deep as 500 metres, Filipino scientists have found
absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their
ancestors were already using wireless technology".

--
"faith is just another lame excuse for failures"
-- Gary Hobson

Haha - good one!

[oldblue]

the start of the beginning -> the end of internet cafe's.

[ILuvDetailing]

The real wireless broadband coming up is Wi-Max.

Is this available here?

[EL Chicane]

Is this available here?

Malapit na. Malamang next year meron ng pilot run sa Metro Manila.

[EL Chicane]

the start of the beginning -> the end of internet cafe's.

Pre, kailangan mo pa rin ng computer. Yung mga customer ng internet cafes, wala kasi silang personal computers or laptops so all these Wi-fi stuffs are meaningless to them.

[silver_corolla]

Wi-Fi for the people
(Manila Standard Today, Digital Life by Chin Wong)

Wifi Ng Bayan’s soft launch of a fixed wireless broadband service will give residential users fast Internet access (2 megabits per second) for P900 a month.





From a windy perch in the Nipa Hut restaurant overlooking the Valle Verde residential subdivisions in Pasig City, some engineers are hunched over their notebook PCs.
It’s an unlikely place for a revolution to start, but there’s an insurgent quality about what’s going on this Friday morning. Some day, these folks might revolutionize the telecommunications business.

Right now, they have more modest goals. They’re doing a stress test on a Wi-Fi signal beamed from an antenna a few hundred meters away.

“We’re getting our signal from there,” says Jasper Nicolas, operations manager at Wifi Ng Bayan, pointing to an outdoor access point rising from the roof of the Victory Christian School.

“The pastor’s a techie, and when we said we’d give him free Internet access for the school, he said yeah, you can put your access point here,” adds George Royeca, managing director.

On the notebooks, some interesting things are happening.

An engineer is downloading streaming video that plays flawlessly. On another test later on, I watch video being streamed while the same file is being downloaded into the notebook. A window shows the download speed to be about 1.8 megabits per second.

At another table, engineers from Eastern Telecom are testing their voice over IP service using the Wi-Fi connection. I get on the phone and chat with one of them, who’s using a cellphone. The sound is crisp.

The Valle Verde tests are part of Wifi Ng Bayan’s soft launch of a fixed wireless broadband service that will give residential users fast Internet access (2 megabits per second) for P900 a month.

The company’s Wi-Fi setup is different from most other wireless installations in two important ways.

First, it uses specially designed multi-radio access points to increase the bandwidth available to receive and retransmit the Internet signal.

Second, its access points communicate with each other in a mesh network, extending the reach and strength of the signal and making the network more robust.

The system is unique and a product of necessity, Royeca says.

“It’s not that we’re smarter than anyone else. Wi-Fi is affordable, but the Americans and Europeans don’t need it for broadband. To them, Wi-Fi is a toy; it’s just for laptops. For broadband, they use fiber and copper. But for us, fiber and copper are expensive and a nightmare to install, so we’ve modified Wi-Fi to do what we need.”

To boost the signal to the home, each subscriber will have an external antenna — about the size of a Pringles canister — connected by wire to one PC. It’s possible to share that connection with the use of a wireless router.

Just as intriguing as the technology is Wifi Ng Bayan’s viral business model. The company wants to disperse ownership of the network to hundreds of community patrons, who will pump in P250,000 each to connect their neighborhoods and partake of the revenues that subscribers will generate.

If the system works in Valle Verde, it can be easily replicated anywhere else in the country, Royeca says.

I’m hoping it does. I’d love to pay only a third of what I’m paying PLDT today to get four times the speed of my current DSL service. Now that’s the kind of revolution I’m willing to join.