Coming of Cometa

MARK THIS DATE on your calendar: Dec. 5, 2002. If you were at the news conference, you might have witnessed the birth of the wireless equivalent to Ma Bell.

Admit it: Weren’t we all just a little bit happier when there was only one phone company to blame?

I ask this question in light of the creation of Cometa Networks by AT&T, IBM, and Intel. Cometa will attempt to form a single national Wi-Fi network.

The company will deploy the Wi-Fi infrastructure in national hotel, mall, and restaurant chains for openers. Once that’s done, Cometa’s founding members will offer the missing pieces: AT&T for the backhaul, IBM Global Services for deployment and management, and Intel for the IEEE 802.11x technology.

My guess is that the ambitious plan also has on its road map the creation of wireless MANs (metropolitan area networks). On the back end, MANs typically connect to the wired fiber network. Then, with base-station antennas atop buildings, the MANs transmit signals via a variety of proprietary wireless spectrums to subscriber buildings, which connect using Ethernet to the IEEE 802.11x access points. It could create, in theory at least, a wireless bubble around an entire city. And like the building of the railroads 150 years ago, the various bubbles might be linked, in this case by a combination of wired and wireless technology for a national data and voice over IP network.

I’m telling you, these big boys aren’t fooling around.

In the preliminary stages, Cometa sells the wireless access to either the enterprise or to the building owners, who offer it to their tenants.

Down the road, in order to get the exclusive license to operate across city-owned property and infrastructure, Cometa will offer government facilities Wi-Fi access free of charge, similar to the way television cable operators promise free public-access channels. The way I see it, governments roll over pretty quickly.

Cometa’s biggest problem will come from the grassroots startup companies that already offer public and private Wi-Fi access to buildings, retailers, libraries, train stations, airports, and the like. Can Cometa muscle out these providers? It remains to be seen. If deployed right, the company will have a powerful case to make to the enterprise for a single, secure, reliable, and manageable system.

At present, all Steve Harris, Cometa vice president of corporate affairs, would admit is that the company is looking into ways to connect the various hot-spot locations that they will deploy.

Among the other things Cometa officials said they were not prepared to talk about is pricing. Do you think it will be inexpensive?

So, at what point do the benefits of paying for a technology that enables business outweigh the high cost of doing business? There is an answer: When you can’t afford not to do business.