I have been following the municipal wifi market over the last year following an investment I made in RoamAD, a wireless infrastructure vendor.
Quebec, as with Canada in general, has a strong wireless history (congratulations Mr. Sirois !) and it is still being driven today by VC’s such as Acta Wireless, Trio Capital and Garage Canada along with the “usual suspects” of Caisse de Depot and FTQ.
Montreal now has some serious players in the Wimax market, including SR Telecom, Maravedis and Wavesat; but Why, I ask, is nothing happening in the area of wifi? I know I’m going to sound very much like a conspiracy theorist but is this a coincidence ? The guys at Ils Sans Fils have doon a great job at getting hotspots throughout Montreal, as have Eye-In Wireless, but nothing of any scale has even been mooted in Montreal.
I have done some work on a wholsesale/retail business model for a Wireless ISP (along the lines of the UK’s Cloud and think that something along those lines could work in Canada (It does for Wimax!!), but one of the issues I’ve been tackling recently is the network roll out and in particular site acquisition.
Utility providers and the various “cities” of Montreal have infrastructure that might be usable but it has also been suggested to me that other companies may have citywide infrastructure that may assist in getting the site acquisition rolling quickly. Is anyone willing to stand up to the evil forces of Montreal’s Wimax community ?
(I don’t really think there is a conspiracy, or that the Wimax community is evil – sometime you’ve just got to, and I quote, “weave the pot of soup!”)
by Mat
You mention ISF… do you not think there is a way to scale their model?
I’m reminded of FON. In my opinion, this is the most socially advantageous way to roll out wifi around the world… what are your thoughts John?
by John
Scaling ISF is not an easy task. The people at ISF work hard and put in a lot of hours but I think that the extra work load necessary to scale it is going to mean that the network needs to become a commercial enterprise.
FON is doing a very good job at increasing the number of hotspots but their business model needs some serious development if they want to compete with commercial mesh networks and have any long term impact on the wifi market. That said, I do think that they are in a better position than the purely community based networks. I have some more thoughts that i’ll incorporate into a new post.
by Austin Hill
Hi John,
One of the interesting attributes of Montreal are the number of interesting grassroots social projects that are occurring in the city.
One of the them, Ils Sans Fil provides free community Wi-fi in many areas around the city.
They also innovate on location based community IP services. This is a great non-profit initiative and I use them regularly to get my free wi-fi around the plateau.