When we do commercial WiFi installations in hotels, cafés, or community housing projects, one of the main issues is how to provide client equipment that has little or no setup hassle.
I mean, we are currently working on a WiFi setup for a business hotel/apartmetn chain here in Copenhagen. They want to offer free WiFi as an amenity, and have already setup a system that covers one of their sites in town. When a customer wants Internet access and she doesn’t have WiFi in their laptop (surprisingly often) they borrow a unit from the hotel reception. Currently they use USB adapters, that require the installation of a driver. Even if you ignore for a minute the small percentage of users that are non-windows, there are 4 or 5 possible windows versions out there each with a different way of installing drivers and setting up networking. With no skilled IT personnel at the front desk that can become a real issue for the hotel. And (a little surprisingly) the biggest problem seems to b the administration of the actual driver CDs. CD’s are so easy to forget in your laptops CD drive that it is an all to common occurence where the hotel lends out an adapter, and gets the adapter back minus the driver CD.
Luckily for us our friends at KooKu have an interesting solution to this problem which we’ll be testing with the aforementioned hotel/apartment chain. The Gemtek WL-299C is pretty much a standard Wireless (802.11b) ethernet adapter much like the Linksys WET11 or any number of other Ethernet adapters from various manufacturers. That means it plugs into the computer using the existing ethernet port, and acts as a bridge between the wired and the wireless networks. For any computer with an existing ethernet port set up, and running DHCP, this means wireless networking without installing additional drivers.
The main difference between most other ethernet adaptyers and the Gemtek unit is extremely simple and fairly subtle. The unit is powered through USB rather than through a separate power adapter, in other words you plug it into your usb port, and your ethernet port, and it requires no external power source and no drivers. A simple solution that solves a minor annoyance for sites that want to offer WiFi but don’t want the support nightmare of lending out (or renting out) pc-card or usb-based adapters.
For a description of the unit, here’s a pdf from Kooku: download (Edit: The link has been corrected 2003-01-13)
If you’re interested in purchasing this unit, or just want more information, let me know: e-mail
A common thinking among “Marketing people ” is that for every product that enters the market there must be a path, a target, a need ( real or created) that decides how the product must enter the consumer’s life, which part of the population is more likely to go for it, which niche it is going to fill and, most important “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” and that is the final issue: the price.
Depending on those anavoidable patterns a product is more or less ready for a certain market.
High technologically devices, the ones that offer perfect quality and cost a fortune will target the elitarian market, where the price has not big importance (on the contrary, if the price would be lower than what certain people can afford, the product wouldn’t reach them) since it means luxury.
When a product ceases to be luxury and begins to be a need, then the mass market is ready. The product can enter 60% of consumers’ lives, reach easily a good upgrade in the percentage and become ” The New Product of the year 200….”.
Let’s consider the VoIP market.
Prior to recent theoretical work on social needs, the usual purpose of a product invoked individual (social) behaviors. We now know that these assumptions are not completely wrong.
Wrong would be NON considering them.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole offer will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no one of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.
Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding – most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.
In other words:
give to the people the choice among desktop phones and mobile phones and the majority will choose what they think more convenient, in spite of the cost of the service.
In a way the cost of the service is the only left advantage in favour of the fixed telephony.
If the price was the same the desktop phones would disappear from the life of the average consumer (mass market consumer).
To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their favorite way of telecommunication. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each kind of telephony. This distribution would be basically flat – most kind of telephony will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the telephony will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the voice, the availability, the design of the device nor other people’s choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.
This is the mass market of VoIP as dreamed and forecasted by most hardware producers.
People would choose VoIP in spite of the fact that the systems are not intercommunicating, the available phones are just desktop phones, most of the population doesn’t have a “Flat rate DSL” and some do not even have a decent connection, (just one ” UP to…) and just because VoIP means cutting cost.
They have a few wrong assumptions:
1) Most of the people want to save calling internationally
2) Most of the people will use a cheap Flat rate connection
3) Most of the people know how to handle a computer or a network, and so solve all the eventual problems that could arise.
But they do not consider that:
1) Most people call locally and just a few once in a while internationally.
2) Most of the people do not have a cheap flat rate Internet
3) Most of the people are not IT experts.
Besides people’s choices do affect one another. If we assume that any kind of telephony chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically.
If Robert ( our average mass market consumer) likes to have a phone in his pocket, available mostly anywhere, it is very likely that Mary would like the same.
Is VoIp ready for the ” Mass Market”?
The answer could be No and Yes.
What would VoIP offer more than the existing several choices?
1) Price. Telephone calls would be completely free of charge among two IP phones ( and that believe me is a GREEEEAT THING when you try it)
2) The never enough considered satisfaction to be able to ref..ck who f..cked us for many years…
What would VoIP telephony need to be #1 spot in the curve?
1) A reliable PORTABLE Phone that doesn’t need millions of Hot Spot’s to work.
2) A reliable, cheap flat rate internet connection anywhere for everybody.
If ONE could put these patterns together, THEN VoIP would really have the chance to be #1.
See my website: http://www.worldonip.com or contact me patrizia@worldonip.com
Interesting solution, set in this mode the wifi is really comfortable. Thank you!