Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cometa Wholesaling Wi-Fi Access - 9 December 2002

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 14:26:27 -0500

Cometa Wholesaling Wi-Fi Access

 Wi-Fi hotspots are becoming the next gold rush for the computer and telecommunications
 industry. But is that gold in the hills or just fool's gold? Last week three big
 players, AT&T, IBM and Intel, along with two investment companies formed a new company
 called Cometa. Their plan is simple: Deploy over 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in the 50
 largest cities and wholesale wireless data to whoever wants to buy it and resell it.

 Since no terrestrial network has ever made money offering data-only services, what do
 these folks know that the rest of the industry does not?

Okay, let's see if I have this correct. Intel, IBM, AT&T (not wireless), Apax Partners and
3i have formed a new company called Cometa that is going to put into service and then
wholesale Wi-Fi access in the top fifty U.S. cities so that Wi-Fi access is only a
five-minute walk away from any city dweller and a 5-minute drive away from a suburbanite.
With 20,000 Wi-Fi access points?

Let's play with some math here. Each access point today can cover a roughly circular area
out to about 300 feet from the center. That works out to about 283,000 square feet per
access point. 20,000 of these access points will provide about 203 square miles of Wi-Fi
coverage spread out over the 50 largest U.S. cities or 4 square miles of coverage per
city.

To put this in perspective, a typical 850-MHz urban cell site covers a radius of three
miles or 28 square miles. This means that Cometa plans to provide coverage equivalent to
less than one-fifth of a cell site per city. Access points will be scattered around the
cities in locations where groups of people want and need high-speed wireless access.

The announcement didn't mention anything about airports so I assume it will leave airports
to others and T-Mobile already provides access at Starbucks coffee shops. That still
leaves plenty of territory for Cometa. But it will probably run out of access points if it
unwires a single university in each city. So I have to ask what the big deal is.

There are ten or so hotspot providers today with more than 4,000 hotspots located in more
than 300 cities in 43 states. Adding another 20,000 is a significant undertaking but I
don't see anything in Cometa's announced plans about aggregating access to hotspots
already in place. If this is the case, Cometa will become one of ten or more players that
wide-area wireless operators will have to deal with when putting together their own
wide-area/Wi-Fi offerings.

Cometa admits that the backhaul is one of the most costly parts of putting together a
Wi-Fi hotspot system. But since AT&T (the long distance company) is part of this new
company it will be able to make use of AT&T's existing high-speed backhaul and thereby
save a lot of money. What this means to me is that AT&T will underwrite the cost of the
backhaul and many of the hotspots will be located where AT&T already has wired high-speed
connectivity, not necessarily where there is demand. But until we see how and where Cometa
rolls out its own hotspots it won't be possible to fully understand its business model.

There are two established types of hotspot users: Those who travel and want and need
access back to their corporate information (using some type of secure Virtual Private
Network or VPN) and those who are local to a hotspot location and visit a Starbucks or
other caf in order to take advantage of higher-speed access than they have at home. These
two groups have very different usage patterns. Local folks want to sit in a caf sipping
coffee for several hours while surfing the Internet while business travelers, for the most
part, want to set up their system, get to their corporate LAN, download their email, check
their calendar, perhaps retrieve a file and get off the system.

Cometa appears to be aiming at both of these groups and we will have to wait to see
whether it can be successful as a wholesale Wi-Fi service provider. With today's business
models it is difficult to figure how a wholesale company can make money. On its Web site,
Boingo states that hotspot operators get $1.00 per connection through Boingo. If they sign
up Boingo users they receive an additional finder's fee. At $1.00 per connection how can a
hotspot provider that doesn't have high-speed backhaul in place for some other purpose
stay in business?

One keys to Cometa's success or lack thereof will be how cost effectively it can set up
this business and how lean it can run. The company will be located in two locations, one
on the East coast and one on the West. Even if AT&T gives away its backhaul (which I
doubt), I can't see how Cometa can make a profit. None of today's hotspot providers are
making any money there have already been a number of failures (T-Mobile bought MobileStar
at pennies on the dollar). I have to wonder what secret sauce Comenta has that the others
don't.

Yes, the demand for Wi-Fi access is growing and yes, wide-area operators are trying to
figure out their own play in this space. But the number of mobile users who are willing to
camp out at a location, boot up their notebook computers, log onto the provider for that
location and then use the service (at a reasonable price) is a small fraction of the
notebook user population. I believe that the only way to justify the cost of an extensive
public Wi-Fi hotspot network is if there is a value proposition beyond the pay-for-usage
model. The benefits realized by the company that bills the customer for Wi-Fi service must
go beyond the fees they receive from customers. Intangible benefits include keeping a
wide-area voice-and-data customer from jumping ship to another network with a combination
wide-area and hotspot system, adding revenue per user (ARPU) that can be quantified or
perhaps even selling more coffee.

I believe in hotspots and I use them often (but only the ones with reasonable pricing). I
also use my wide-area wireless data PC Card often. I do want a combination Wi-Fi and
wide-area wireless data service but I want to receive a single, reasonable bill. Cometa's
idea of becoming a Wi-Fi wholesaler is interesting and if it were the only company a
wide-area wireless network had to deal with in order to obtain a large enough Wi-Fi
footprint I might believe that it had broken the code.

Someone at Intel or IBM or AT&T or all three must believe that there is money to be made
as a Wi-Fi hotspot wholesaler. I welcome any of them or the folks at Comenta to share
their business model with me and prove to me that it can make money as a standalone
business for the partners that have invested in it.

In the meantime, the Wireless LANd grab continues. Wide-area wireless companies are trying
to figure out how to put together the best locations at the best pricing for their own
customers. They are trying to figure out how to charge for both wide-area and Wi-Fi data
access because they know there is a demand. But it appears to me that Wi-Fi hotspots may
become similar to the dot-com frenzy: lots of folks believing all of the hype that
surrounds this new, hot set of services getting into it without filling in the blanks on a
spreadsheet.

Those who move ahead because there is a business case, those who can prove to their
investors that they can make money here and those who have stepped back and looked at the
total size of the market and how much of that TAM they can capture should be moving full
speed ahead. Those who are jumping into the Wi-Fi hotspot market because the industry is
looking for the next big thing and Wi-Fi is it had better take a few days off, walk around
the block or on the beach, and then sit down with their spreadsheets and figure out how
they are going to make money at the Wi-Fi game!

                                     Andrew M. Seybold

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