Conference-goers scooped their lunch from the buffet at the center of the room -- deli meats, assorted pastas, chicken, fish, and pot roast. The vendors -- some hopeful, others expectant -- stuck to their booths lining the walls, eyeing their potential customers and each other. The folks from Firetide touting their 5 ghz surveillance network had their sample camera trained on the "big spender" across the room: Earthlink.
"Some of these guys are on their fourth or fifth round of venture capital funding," the Motorola rep told me from behind a laptop at his booth. "That can't last." He predicted many of the companies with booths at the conference would be out of business within six months.
Or swallowed up. Motorola purchased MeshNetworks in 2004 and Wireless Valley in 2005. More recently, it announced a deal for Netopia, a maker of customer premises equipment for strengthening broadband signals. This approach has helped it secure the largest product line in the industry, complementing an extensive list of government contracts, especially in public safety communications.
But Bel Air still has pluck and what some consider the best radios in the business. "I didn't give a rat's ass which devices we used. I've got all of these guys' stuff in my lab," said Joe Caldwell from US Internet, standing in front of the Bel Air booth and motioning to the adjacent displays of their competitors. He said they chose Bel Air for their deployment in Minneapolis because their units performed the best and in spite of the fact that they cost "an arm and a leg."
Bel Air is not completely tied to US Internet. The equipment manufacturer was also touting its role in the independent eWashtenaw deployment in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and in the Dolphin Stadium deployment for Superbowl XLI. But Earthlink has been using Tropos and Motorola hardware, so when Earthlink win contracts that's bad news for Bel Air. Conversely, with such a huge fan at US Internet, Bel Air will benefit if US Internet wins any of the handful of projects in the south it's bidding on.
What about long term plans for US Internet? Caldwell repeated the claim I heard at MuniWireless in Minneapolis, that they are in it "for the long haul" and do not plan to sell the company. "There's a reason we put the US in front of our name," Caldwell said. But he also said five different companies have made offers.
Bel Air is continuing to innovate, integrating GSM capability into their devices. Jim Freeze wouldn't name the company, but he said a cellular provider was experimenting with using one of their mesh networks for backhaul phone traffic and that a second provider was about to start trying it out. Comcast is already a major investor in Bel Air and the cable giant has a close relationship with Sprint.
"Some people say wireless is not ready for primetime," Freeze said as part of his presentation to the conference. "That's nonsense."
And of course there's Cisco, another big spender. It didn't have a booth, but it was a sponsor of the event and a Sales Business Development Manager was there to moderate one of the panels, eat some lunch, and liaison with IBM.
Cisco has already started a big push to buy up smaller companies, especially with its nascent Media Solutions Group. Earlier this year, it bought Scientific Atlanta, a maker of consumer level set-top video boxes. Now they are reportedly in a bidding war with Motorola for Terayon, which also provides digital video technology. They're still focused on core network services, but the traffic demands of video will drive everyone to upgrade their networks, and that means money in Cisco's pocket. And I suppose someone has to compete with Motorola.
Cisco is a sponsor of GovTech's Digital Communities, too, and my livelihood is almost as connected to the fate of this industry as are those of the people I was interviewing. From what I could tell, I was the only reporter covering this conference.
The fates of other people who work in ancillary Wi-Fi businesses, like conferences, are also tied to the rises and falls in the industry. So I wasn't surprised when one of the DCC organizers was quick to draw a distinction with the MuniWireless conference, a competitor. "We're much more focused on improving city management," the organizer said. "That's why so many of the people here are CIOs or city managers."
Terry McGowan from PacketHop agreed. At the end of the second day, I jokingly asked him if he'd rung up any sales at the conference. He gave an answer, but in a common obstacle in writing this article, when I confirmed the quote with him, the Director of Corporate Marketing intervened and rephrased the answer: "The conference was very worthwhile for PacketHop," said Kevin Payne of PacketHop. "We found that there was a lot of interest in our solutions for municipal services and that there were many opportunities to meet with actual decision makers."
The PacketHop demo was actually pretty interesting. The product allows emergency service vehicles to form local area networks, sharing video feeds and situational maps. The emergency responders can hook into a wireless network to send that information back to a command center, where a coordinator can draw plans and positions on the maps. The Department of Homeland Security test drove it during an exercise in Long Beach, CA, this past April.
Back at the Digital Cities Convention, Robert Ramsay, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto who is studying the municipal wireless industry, was giving his perspective on the event: "The difference [between the two conferences] is that Daniel [Aghion, from W2i] is a businessman and Esme [Vos, from MuniWireless] is an activist."
This distinction jumps out when you compare how digital inclusion was presented at each conference. In Minneapolis, local advocates like Becca Vargo Daggett and Catherine Settani led the discussion. In Philadelphia, IBM, another Digital Communities sponsor, held the chair.
A few minutes at the IBM booth helped dispel my skepticism. Patrick O'Mara showed me aDesigner and Easy Web Browsing, applications that review and improve a website's accessibility for the sight-impaired. He described another service that would allow a sign language translator to be available on demand via webcam at points of purchase or service. The goal is to put public websites on equal footing with public buildings as far as accessibility goes.
"This is part of digital inclusion now," Andy MacIsaac, another IBM rep, explained.
GovTech.net got a 73 on their "compliance score," which is not great. Apparently, the contrast and font size can be hard for some people to read, there is a lack of alternate text for images, and it would take too long for software to voice all of the text on the home page. For $35,000 plus a service contract, IBM can fix that.
Don't be mistaken: IBM's Anne-Rivers Forcke, who was leading the digital inclusion discussion, will make the business case for spending that money to serve hearing-, sight-, and physically-impaired customers or city residents if that's what will convince you, but she'll start with the ethical case. Either way, "the business community really needs to be taking the lead," she told me, rather than waiting for Congress or the courts to mandate website accessibility.
That dovetails with what Mike Dillon, IBM's Director, Industry Solutions, Safety, Security & Community Broadband, explained in the conference keynote: "IBM recommends the investment and development of infrastructure over betting on business models." He was talking about the whole municipal wireless industry, describing a shift "from monetization to rationalization."
Dillon presented a chart that measured different rationalizations along axes of profit and trust, with public safety high on the trust but low on the profit and service provision high on the profit but low on the trust. In the middle was economic development. He added that he was very suspicious of ad revenue as an economic driver of large-scale wireless deployments.
Of course, what you see in this shifting field all depends on where you sit. Interest and energy remain high, but many cities, it seems, are in a wait and see mode as the technology and, more importantly, the business models prove themselves in the high profile projects like Minneapolis and Philadelphia. Or cities are willing to go through a slow process to make sure they get it right. Despite predictions of rapid growth in the industry, the contracts won't come fast enough to keep all of the small players in business.
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Joshua Breitbart currently serves as policy director for People's Production House in New York City and as vice president of the Ethos Group, which advises municipalities and community organizations on broadband development. He is a regular contributor to Digital Communities.
