Tomorrow night I am chairing an event at the MIT Entrprise Forum. It’s title is Wireless Broadband. You can read more here , and I’ve excerpted the summary here:
Wireless access to the home is perhaps the best hope for a broadband alternative to the duopoly of the incumbent cable and phone giants. Join us for an evening of debate about whether wireless broadband can make significant inroads and become a competitive force. If it can, which technologies will it be, … GSM, WiMax, or others. Will free or low cost municipal networks such as those being deployed in Houston and Philadelphia become common, or will the incumbents succeed in blocking them legislatively. Lastly, where are the opportunities for the entrepreneur to catch the wireless “wave” that is coming.
We’ve got Jeff Thompson, CEO of TowerStream and Bob Zakarain, President of Community WISP. Mark Desautels, VP of Wireless Broadband for CTIA had to drop out, he was asked by the mayor of LA to chair a working group to provide free connectivity for the city.
I’m looking forward to learning more about the goings on in the wireless connectivity world. I’ve got a rough picture in my head of the competing technologies: wi-fi hotspots, WiMax (including plans to fly blimps over Texas to provice WiMax access to hundreds of square miles), Flarion, 3G technologies like EVDO and Edge, and further out the promise of mesh networks. But, it will be neat to see how some players in the space are currently using such things and what they think the future holds.