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Editor's Perspective
The breakfast club
By Dan O'Shea
April 29, 2003
The warehouse district of downtown Austin, Texas, is brimming with restaurants and bars of all types. In the middle of it all, at 4th and Lavaca, is Halcyon, a sort of coffeehouse/bar/groove parlor and one of the few places where you are likely to see Austin's Polo-shirted professionals and tattooed Bohemians mix without cursing each other's presence too much.
Halcyon offers something that people who run in both of these crowds like: free wireless Internet. Unlike the little
T-Mobile hot spot sticker on the door of your local Starbucks (or was that just another credit card emblem?), Halcyon advertises its network coverage on a knee-high chalkboard standing at its always-open front doors. Halcyon doesn't call it 802.11b Wi-Fi or a "Halcyon hot spot," though that's what it is.
If you show up at Halcyon some mornings, you are likely to see the free wireless Internet service getting quite a workout: A handful of regulars come in early nearly every day to grab coffee and a scone while checking e-mail. Some of them, an increasing number in the last several months, check the postings on job sites.
Then, there are the district's other business people. Restaurant and bar owners, maybe a dozen of them from a three or four-block radius, come in almost every morning and log on to order inventory, pay bills, update menus on their own Web sites.
These are real business applications that take time, one coffee leading into another, and they're doing it all for free. It's like a telco's or mobile carrier's dream and nightmare converging, and these users don't even have much-touted Wi-Fi phones in their hands yet.
At a Starbuck's a few blocks away, a local businessman comes in every other day and uses the T-Mobile hot spot to check e-mail and have instant message chats with friends in another part of the country. He pays for it, of course, and you have to wonder if he knows about the free service that's available within a five-minute walk.
Places like Halcyon upset the broadband food chain in some way. Maybe they are under the radar a bit, but when business users are conducting their business over free broadband connections, somebody's losing. It's not those users, and it's not Halcyon, whose real business, after all, is selling coffee.
E-mail me at doshea@primediabusiness.com.
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Top News
AT&T Wireless delivers strong quarter
By Dan O'Shea
April 24, 2003
AT&T Wireless reported a quarterly record EBITDA for its first quarter, as well as lower churn, but these figure were posted amid lower new customer additions and slightly lower earnings per share.
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Nextel posts another profit
April 24, 2003
Nextel Communications was among mobile carriers that reported strong first quarter numbers, though the Reston, Va. company showed a little weakness with slightly lower average revenue per user than the previous quarter.
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Palm befriends Wi-Fi, Wayport
By Dan O'Shea
April 24, 2003
Palm has unveiled two new mobile data devices, including a Tungsten C handheld directed at enterprise users that comes with an integrated Wi-Fi interface and an offer for a free Wi-Fi service trial from network operator
Wayport.
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Reporter's Notebook
More bad news from Ericsson
April 29, 2003
Ericsson has announced another quarterly loss, its 10th in a row, amounting to about $421 million. It also stated in its earnings report today that it is planning several thousand more job cuts than previously were anticipated as part of sweeping layoffs this year and next year. The company currently has aout 61,000 employees, and plans to reduce this figure to about 47,000 in 2004.
The announcement of further job cuts sent the company stock up more than 25% through late-day trading at the Stockholm exchange.
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Wi-Fi finding its voice
April 29, 2003
NEC America was set to announce at Networld+Interop this week its plans for voice-over-wireless LAN hardware and software. We had reported a few weeks back that NEC was teaming up with new WLAN security switch vendor
Airespace to integrate Airespace's technology with NEC's existing IP-PBX product for the corporate enterprise.
IP telephony offerings for wireless LANs also are available from the likes of
Spectralink Corp.,
Symbol Technologies, and
Cisco Systems also is formally announcing its entry, the Wireless IP Phone 7920, at the Networld+Interop event this week.
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