Your opinion?

In the January Webinar Motorola talked adout Canopy Lite. Their were two things I found interesting.

1. Canopy Lite will only work with Advantage AP’s so you only have till the end of march to trade up if you are going to use Lite.

2. Moto will be offering bandwidth upgrades for Lite all the way up to 7mb and they say they will still be cheaper than a normal SM. But what I find disturbing is the fact that the only way to implement the upgrades will be threw the use of Prizm. When checking my email last week I was notified of the Feb Webinar and it stated that they were going to talk about the HotZone WiFi and software release 8.0. This got me thinking How long will it be before we have a software release for all canopy that requires Prizm. I must state this Motorola did not in any way indicate that this was their plan, But it makes you wonder.

That sure would hurt the little guy’s. What do you all think?

>1. Canopy Lite will only work with Advantage AP’s so you only
>have till the end of march to trade up if you are going to use Lite.

Ridiculous. There’s no way I’m investing $20K in Advantage when I already paid as much as $5K for the P8 APs two years ago.

> But what I find disturbing is the fact that the only way to
>implement the upgrades will be threw the use of Prizm.

If that’s entirely true, then Motorola will lose us as a customer for future AP deployment. I’ve spent a million dollars with them in the last 12 months. Maybe they won’t care.

> That sure would hurt the little guy’s. What do you all think?

Motorola has richly earned their distrust and poor reputation as far as listening to their customer. That’s what I think.

This isn’t the 70s and 80, or even the 90s anymore. Wrapping your product up with tonnes of proprietary, expensive management software and forcing the customers to use it will end in pain for Motorola. Look what has happened to Nortel - anyone who was using Nortel gear will tell you that other companies were 1/3rd the price and let them manage the equipment without jumping through expensive proprietary hoops. It killed Nortel… Motorola will be next if they keep doing that.

Let me say this again Motorola did not say future upgrades would take this same path.

In reality it couldn’t happen. If you only needed to buy a BH link it would be silly to have to buy $4000.00 worth of software just to upgrade the units.

just to varify what i heard i took this off the main Canopy Lite site.

Part of Motorola’s globally proven Canopy platform, Canopy Lite SMs are designed to help network operators convert dial-up subscribers to broadband simply, quickly… and profitably. The Canopy Lite SMs work in concert with the Canopy Advantage access points and deliver speeds of 512 Kbps throughput with 768 Kbps burst and a maximum of 100 Kbps full duplex Committed Information Rate (CIR). The Canopy Lite SMs offer substantially lower costs with the same high performance, reliability and interference tolerance for which the Canopy system is renowned.

Easily integrated into your Canopy network, Canopy Lite SMs are scaleable, available initially in the 5.7 GHz frequency band and can be software upgraded via the Canopy PrizmEMS™ (to 1, 2, 4 or 7 Mbps) to add incremental throughput quickly and economically. Additional frequencies will be introduced in 2006 so be sure to check back often to see the new product listings.


As far as upgrading to advantage I feel your pain Lucky for us most of our stuff is 900 but still we are going to have to spend 50k to upgrade everything else. We feel with our voip, double the threwput, and the option of Lite it will be worth it to upgrade. With the promo we save 50k now.

As far as Prizm and lite I guess if we plan on opening up the bandwidth we will have to buy Prizm, and I don’t mind having to spend that kind of money on the program is’t the license for every sector that hurts. I bet just those will cost us 15 to 20k alone.

You don’t feel that at the current price point of these units, those expenses are ridiculous? 802.11 is down to $25 a PCMCIA card and $65 for a router, in Canadian bozo-bucks.

The high cost for Canopy equipment is a good thing as it is a barrier to entry. If the prices drop down, everybody will be deploying Canopy, and then we are all in very deep trouble. Much below 250 bucks and it’s too easy to get into Canopy.

As far as I am concerned, the folks trying to use 802.11 to provide Wifi can all fight it out amongst themselves. Right now I don’t have any other Canopy or other OFDM systems near my network, and I like it. I have enough trouble with interference, I can’t image how bad it would be if there were 4 or 5 other guys trying to deploy it.

The trade in cost is peace of mind and worth it. Let me say it again, the trade in cost is worth the peace of mind.

As far as Moto forcing the use of Prism to deploy Canopy Lite, I seriously doubt that they charge 4000 for Prism in developing countries which are Canopy Lite’s original target market. If they sell some in the US that’s great for Moto, but we are not the intended market for this product.

You let us know how well your monopoly grows once the telcos start deploying WiMax with no setup fees.

We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I imagine that we will continue to survive by providing excellent customer service, something the Telcos have proven over and over they cannot do.

Jerry Richardson wrote:
I imagine that we will continue to survive by providing excellent customer service, something the Telcos have proven over and over they cannot do.


It's a nice fantasy at least. I've been doing this 14 years now, and I don't share it. Mobile WiMax will slaughter Canopy sales unless Motorola takes the product into the same place - and it will probably slaughter it anyways based on the cost of the Canopy gear. "Lite" products are a mistake, IMHO. If you can find me a market where the lowest price for the highest perceived value (don't ever doubt that telcos will gleefully lie about the quality and speed of their service) hasn't won out, beers are on me.

The good news: we probably have three years.

Wish the FCC would give up that 700-750? Mhz spectrum to WISP’s.

I agree that we don’t agree… :slight_smile:

With that said, bringing more to the table than just bandwidth is the trick. The more your customers depend on you, the less likely they are to change (people don’t like change).

Before doing this, I sold Home Entertainment Systems, and Home Theaters. We had to compete against the Internet box companies. When the Plasma from me is 1200 more than the Internet, there better be some damn good reasons to buy from me. Value, Value, Value. Customer education, customer support, a guy at the end of the phone, a truck roll on a friday night, answering the phone on Sunday, customer has my cell phone number, etc, etc.

Will I roll out 10,000 customers in the face of DSL, cable, and WiMAX? Not likeley. Will I develop relationships with hundreds of Businesses, City, County, State, Muni’s, and Backhaul Services for other providers? You bet. Those relationships are going to carry us forward.

There are ALWAYS opportunities in every market.

I like your attitude Jerry, and couldn’t agree more!

I like your attitude Jerry, and couldn’t agree more!

The 802.11x protocals do not actually give an accurate connection rate when you are connecting, they are also very unstable links, and where never ment to be amplified out more than about a 1000 feet max :slight_smile: ( wishful thinking ).

The radios are designed to provide a better quality of service than say your cheap $40 d-link cards, also they are alot more stable and give you accurate data rates.

4 weeks ago we move 2 clusters (9 AP’s) to advantage… we just brought in 50 Lite’s…

for us it is about 25% cheaper to deploy a lite then a regular sm… this will help us to decrease our ROI period…

Well, it’s good to know that if you ran the telephone company a $20.00 telephone would cost $250.00… just to make sure ‘just anyone’ couldn’t get into the telephone business.


I’ll say this again. I don’t have a problem with the AP’s costing a lot. But the price of the SM’s have a long way to go.

FDC


Jerry Richardson wrote:
The high cost for Canopy equipment is a good thing as it is a barrier to entry. If the prices drop down, everybody will be deploying Canopy, and then we are all in very deep trouble. Much below 250 bucks and it’s too easy to get into Canopy.

As far as I am concerned, the folks trying to use 802.11 to provide Wifi can all fight it out amongst themselves. Right now I don’t have any other Canopy or other OFDM systems near my network, and I like it. I have enough trouble with interference, I can’t image how bad it would be if there were 4 or 5 other guys trying to deploy it.

The trade in cost is peace of mind and worth it. Let me say it again, the trade in cost is worth the peace of mind.

As far as Moto forcing the use of Prism to deploy Canopy Lite, I seriously doubt that they charge 4000 for Prism in developing countries which are Canopy Lite’s original target market. If they sell some in the US that’s great for Moto, but we are not the intended market for this product.

Well, it's good to know that if you ran the telephone company a $20.00 telephone would cost $250.00.... just to make sure 'just anyone' couldn't get into the telephone business.


Your argument only serves to reinforce my point.

20.00 phones sound crappy, break easily, and don't have much in the way of performance or features. In the end you are going to wish you had bought a better phone. You really can't use a 900MHz cheapie phone anymore as the spectrum is too crowded.

A 250.00 phone will have better range, frequency selection, sound better, deal with interference, last longer, and have more features. In the end you are going to be glad you have a great phone. You might run into interference, but you will probably be able to get away from it.

I agree it is tough to compete against the Telcos and Cable Companies. If the cost of the CPE's is getting in the way of your growth, there are ways around that. You can lease it and build it into the monthly cost. You can get investors. You can sell more business service. Then there is always Canopy Lite @ 150.00 each. How much cheaper do you want it?

Guys, sometimes I have difficulty identifying who is a Moto employee and who is a customer here.

Of course i want SM’s cheaper.

Why would I want to argue against that from a customer’s perspective?

I guess some of you also want bandwidth costs to be higher, wages to increase and their landlord to double their rent…

If after the above discussion, you still can’t see the point, then there is no way I can explain it in a way you can understand.

When the prices drop, there is Canopy all over the place with no controls, your network won’t run worth a damn, and your customers are bailing out because there is not a damn thing you can go about it, remember this discussion. Only then you understand what I mean.

what jerry is saying is 100% correct. I also understand everyone elses complaints in this matter.

I dont think money is whats stopping new wisps…i think it may only slow down thier growth.

It takes much more than money to build an isp.

Money is easy to get your hands on if you have a solid business plan which is very easy for someone to create even using top of the line and extremely expensive equipment like canopy.

I have people begging me to invest in this company but i would rather suffer now and make more money later.

Now its just a question to know when to stop growing to make the most possible profit from this company.

Vince, if you have people willing to invest… TAKE THE MONEY… you can have 100% of $10million or 80% of $20million…

you are operating in niche market that has a limited time span, you need to grow as big as possible in that time frame, so when that time finishes you are able to deal with the new changes on the horizon…

we are looking for investors all the time… we have just started a relationship with a VC, as part of our plan is to prepare for the wi-max.

Its all about service, and that is not just customer service, its content, your assett as you rightly hinted out is your network, but the value of your network goes beyond simple coverage, you need to look at redundancy and failovers, capacity, etc… and finally in my view intelligence. We are looking at MPLS and other NGN technologies that is what will give us an edge over the others… I have been playing something called VRF for about 2 weeks… check a new thread on seeing how I plan to use that

My RF network consists of about 16 clusters, I have started to see that the bridgetable limit of 4096 is being reached on some of the kit, this is from WAN links for customers with multiple sites, the only solution I can see at this stage is MPLS, thats a router at each pop, on average a cost of 10k per pop, thats 160k for that infrastructure… I would happily give a share for that investment.

A year ago I would have disagreed with both you and Vince regarding the CPE cost, but now I totally agree, when we were small the CPE cost was killing us, really holding us back, but now that we have gone through the pain, our monthly recurring can more then handle it.

It is a barrier to entry and that is good, yes there are cheaper alternatives around, but do they stack up to Canopy… nop… The prices need to remain high… having said that I negotiate EXTREMELY HARD with our suppliers to beat the price down to the ground…

We started of paying $6000USD / MB of bandwidth, but we built it into our business plan and dealt with it, now that we can negotiate on DS3 and OC3 circuits, the price has come down to $1500USD and by the end of next 12 months I hope to have it at $1000USD. Do I want the price to DROP, no, why ? coz every man and his dog will start to offer service and kill my business…