Notes from WiNOG 2006
Well WiNOG 2006 seems to have been a terrific success. A big thanks goes out to Charles and the CWLab team for putting this industry event on each year. I cannot wait to see this conference in ten years time!
Personally I had some great discussions with many individuals that no doubt have spurred me to think (even more) about our industry and the global impact it is having and going to have on communications and information flow.
I was particularly excited chatting with Tony from CWLab. I told him about our equipment woes and what a strange time it is for our industry.
At no time has last mile wireless ever been so promoted and yet we have such a dearth of good last mile equipment available. At MetroBridge we were migrating to WiLAN equipment at each of our new POP sites. Just a few weeks ago WiLAN announced their exit from the hardware game to focus on their patents (another NTP)?
I asked Tony what we could do to convince manufacturers to make radios that WE wanted. The features, quality and price that could help make our wireless ISP's even more successful. We both concluded that manufacturers mostly cared about getting volume orders from major ILEC's and CLEC's. Tony then began to tell me about some great ideas he has for a new generation of radios. Very exciting stuff. I am going to look in to raising some capital for R&D on the concepts. Who knows, maybe this time next year we will have a hardware company!
Dorian