Pajama Entrepreneur

The city of New York told Apple it won’t accept new Macs for its schools until the Wi-Fi problem is fixed. Not sure what the problem is exactly but many users have reported a lag time in logging onto a Wi-Fi network, slow connections on Wi-Fi versus on a wired connection.

Read more here.

Bill Gates: “We’re hopeful that that will be made available so that Wi-Fi can explode in terms of its usage, even out into some of these less dense areas (of the United States) where distance has been a big problem for Wi-Fi.”

Microsoft has been an advocate for unlicensed use of the television “white spaces” spectrum. Click here to read more.

I have written in the past about Blyk, a mobile virtual network operator in the UK, that offers free mobile phone calls to 16-24 year olds in exchange for receiving ads via SMS or MMS. According to this article in the The Times:

The response rate to Blyk’s advertising campaigns, which take the form of text and picture messages, is, it says, 29 per cent. That is more than double the typical response rate to direct marketing and a figure that independent analysts say is extraordinarily high.

Many people are skeptical about the free-calls-for-ads business model since it hasn’t worked in the past. Blyk, however, targets a particular demographic, young people, and they are focusing only on the UK (for now). I can only think of similar free-WiFi-for-ads models such as MetroFi’s and EarthLink’s. EarthLink pulled out of the metro Wi-Fi business and MetroFi wants cities to become anchor tenants; it seems they have abandoned their original business model which had 2 elements: (a) free WiFi with ads; and (b) WiFi with no ads, but pay a fee.

For a Wi-Fi service provider to succeed on the ad model, it needs a lot of people using the service and the “right” people, i.e. the users that the advertisers on the network are seeking to reach. There are a few ad-serving companies targeting ISPs that have launched recently: NebuAd, JiWire (although they’re not a startup, they launched their targeted ad serving business last year), and others.

Nonetheless, I think it is great that people are experimenting with different ways of delivering wireless services to people.

Here’s a little tip I’d like to share with you. If you live in a city and use Wi-Fi at home, you will probably encounter interference from a lot of neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks. The intereference can have a significant effect on the performance of your network, slowing down the speeds at which you send files around (internally among various devices in your house or office), or download/upload files on the Internet.

If you upgrade your Wi-Fi access point to one that uses 802.11n and upgrade your computer and other devices to ones that have 802.11n (or at least get an 802.11n adapter card for older devices), then set your new 802.11n base station to use the 5GHz frequency, you will find that your network’s performance will improve because there’s very little interference on that frequency. Most people do not have 802.11n yet.

My setup: I bought an Apple Airport Extreme base station (with 802.11n) two weeks ago. The Mac Book Pro that I bought last June already has 802.11n built in, so all I had to do was to set the base station to send and receive at 5GHz. The network is now very fast because there’s no interference from my neighbors who are all using 2.4 GHz.

Glenn Fleishman, who wrote the book Take Control of your 802.11n Airport Extreme Network, says he is still waiting for inexpensive 802.11n adapters for the older devices (laptops, etc.) in his house so he can have all of them use 5GHz. I’m waiting, too.

In the past few weeks, I have attended two conferences, Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco and Nokia’s Mobile Mashup in Palo Alto, on the supposedly new world of mobile Internet, a paradise where everyone can use these incredible applications on their mobile phones AND access the Internet in all its glory. Unfortunately we’re stuck with a basic reality: expensive data plans and the attendant roaming charges when you go abroad. Until I can get a cheap, flat-rate, all-you-can-eat worldwide monthly data service plan, I am not going to use these applications. Of course, I already use Google maps, search and visit a variety of websites on my mobile phone using Wi-Fi when I can find it. But Wi-Fi is not yet everywhere and it’s still sometimes a hassle to use: login screens that make you type in long characters (on a cell phone this is very unpleasant), having to pay every time you log on to a different network. Until we have cheap flat rate plans and no roaming charges, I’m afraid it’s a waste of time to develop these apps and attend these events.

UPDATE: SFR, the French operator, launched their version of “unlimited” mobile 3G Internet access. Click here to see the press release and here to see the article with video clip on Journal du Net. Several problems with this:

• There are 3 different tariffs (39, 49 and 69 EUR) with various services, like mobile TV associated with them. I find it confusing.
• You have to sign up for 12 to 24 months. What if you just want access when you are in France occasionally?
• Works only with certain phones.

If this is the mobile operator’s way to encourage mobile Internet use, good luck.

I am such a fan of free open Wi-Fi, but even that won’t get me into a McDonalds (I hate fast food in general). Nevertheless, it is a step in the right direction for European public hotspots which are still dominated by large carriers charging a lot of money for access. The Netherlands’ KPN offers Wi-Fi via its HubHop service, seems to be everywhere, including unfortunately the train stations. Swisscom Eurospot is also in a lot of hotels and charging piles of money.

Signs of change: the Stagecoach buses between London and Oxford, as well as the National Express between London and Cambridge, offer free Wi-Fi on all their buses (click here to read article on Muniwireless).

Now let’s see if other cafes, restaurants and public transport authorities follow. After all, their primary goal is to get butts into those seats. If Wi-Fi can help, then offer it as an amenity.

If you are a pajama entrepreneur like me, you don’t have the luxury of hiring an IT manager for the office, especially if you have a home office. That means YOU are the person in charge of setting up and maintaining your Wi-Fi network, securing it, etc. So, I am pleased to see that Glenn Fleishman has just released updated versions of his very popular, highly readable books: Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Extreme Network and Take Control of Your Wi-Fi Security. Go to Glenn’s site to get the discount code and order online. They are e-books so you can download them, print them at home or read them online. Very handy if you are traveling or work out of different offices (and it costs much less for their publisher to update because they don’t print them).

His “Take Control of your Airport Network” book which I bought a few years ago saved me a lot of time and took the mystery out of wireless networking.