March 8 2006 by The Systemic Analyst.

By Mark Els Network World Canada

Industry analysts have praised Toronto’s plans for a city-wide municipal Wi-Fi network, welcoming Toronto Hydro Telecom Inc. as a major player in business-grade wireless connectivity for ubiquitous Internet access.What makes this different is it’s a blanket. It’s not little areas, so right off bat they have a starting point, a reason for customers [wanting] to go to them. The service is aimed at being different, covering your home and your office.Lawrence Surteesvice-president and principal analyst, communications research at IDC Canada Ltd.Text

The proposed network poses an obvious and very serious threat to traditional telcos such as Bell, Telus and Rogers because the service will be much more than consumer-grade, say analysts. Quality of service will be supported by the utility telco’s Network Operations Centre that monitors network traffic to guarantee maximum bandwidth.

Toronto Hydro Telecom yesterday announced it would begin building out a mesh of Wi-Fi access points to create a wireless hotzone that would blanket all 630 square kilometres of the city by the end of 2009.

The utelco is targeting the financial district by the end of June and hopes to have the downtown core covered by the end of the year.

The company is not new to offering secure, enterprise-class Internet connectivity. Among its customers are four of Canada’s biggest banks, who use Toronto Hydro Telecom’s Gigabit Ethernet fibre optic network to transfer data between their Toronto sites.

Analysts pinpointed the ability to connect to the Internet seamlessly from anywhere as the biggest draw for municipal Wi-Fi. Each time they log on, users can connect with one password and no configuration issues even to a different service provider.

Ubiquitous coverage combined with high bandwidth makes Toronto Hydro Telecom’s offering a strong, viable alternative to the cellular carriers, says Lawrence Surtees, vice-president and principal analyst, communications research at IDC Canada Ltd.

The utelco’s Wi-Fi coverage will reach further across the city than any of the telco’s and Wi-Fi’s 2Mbps transfer rates and far exceeding the 400-700Kbps of 3G broadband cellular.

” First and foremost, what makes this different is it’s a blanket. It’s not little areas, so right off bat they have a starting point, a reason for customers [wanting] to go to them. The service is aimed at being different, covering your home and your office,” says Surtees.

” And if you’re offering better coverage and Internet access that’s better and faster than a mobile wireless data service, then that’s another point of differentiation to think about.”

For a competitive pricing model, Surtees says Toronto Hydro Telecom should be looking not only at the market’s Wi-Fi access prices, but also at monthly and pay-as-you-go Internet access models. “The service needs to be not just different, but also better and/or cheaper.”

Garry Foster of Deloitte & Touche LLP in Toronto describes the city’s project as a great plan, but cautions adoption rates will be slower than anticipated.

” Businesses won’t be giving up their wired networks immediately, but as they learn to layer in security…this will get slow and steady pick-up and then as it gets proven it’ll get faster pick-up,” says Foster, Deloitte’s national director of technology, media and telecommunications.

Wi-Fi is on its way to overcoming one of its biggest challenges, he adds. The technology hasn’t yet shown itself capable of wide coverage, but the Toronto hotzone has the potential to prove Wi-Fi’s full benefits.

” The beauty behind something like this is you’ve got one wireless network, one password and no protocol and firewall issues.”

Using Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet from anywhere will make it particularly attractive to the city’s mobile workforce, says Alicia Wanless, an analyst at Seaboard Group in Toronto.

” Mobility for employees has increased a lot, so getting Internet access anywhere is quite exceptional,” says Wanless. “As a competitor, Toronto Hydro Telecom has really opened its doors and increased its visibility. It’s a really great move on their part, in terms of competing against the telcos.”

According to Surtees, certain civil servants at Industry Canada are believed to be “somewhat chagrined” with the reluctance of the major incumbents to roll out city-wide Wi-Fi coverage.

” It starts to make sense why incumbent phone companies such as Verizon in San Francisco and SBC in Philadelphia have their knickers in a knot about comparable muni-services down there; and why I think Bell, Telus, Rogers are going to be possibly freaking out over this,” he says.

” They have oodles of the same unlicensed spectrum [in the 2.4GHz band], but they’re not making use of that valuable spectrum. They haven’t rolled out any seamless, ubiquitous service. I say all power to Toronto Hydro Telecom for trying to do this.”

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March 8 2006 by The Systemic Analyst.

By Mark Els Network World Canada

Telecommunications experts have been watching the developments at Toronto Hydro Telecom Inc. with avid anticipation ever since David Dobbin was named president of the Toronto Hydro Corp. subsidiary in August.

Yesterday’s announcement of plans to throw a blanket Wi-Fi hotzone over the city came as no surprise. Toronto Hydro Telecom is aiming to cover the downtown core with Wi-Fi access points by the end of this year, starting with the financial district, and hopes to build out to its entire municipal jurisdiction within three years.

As chief operating officer of Telecom Ottawa Inc., Dobbin was responsible for installing a Wi-Fi network in the capital’s downtown core. Since moving to Toronto, he’s been on a hiring spree that helped lure two key players in the wireless field.

Ian Collins, former president of FibreWired Hamilton, was appointed vice-president of operations and Sharyn Gravelle, a former Microcell (Fido) executive, was named vice-president, wireless, and is responsible for the development, deployment and maintenance of Toronto Hydro Telecom’s Wi-Fi network.

Collins was in charge of engineering a hybrid network of Wi-Fi and Wi-Max installations in the Hamilton-Wentworth region last fall. The network was set up to support the Ontario Government’s initiative to install electricity smart meters in every home and business by 2010.

Providing a communications network for Toronto’s smart meters was one of the clear business drivers for the city’s Wi-Fi hotzone, says Dobbin, whose previous work with Hydro One Telecom involved setting up municipal-area and wide-area networks in Southern Ontario before he joined Telecom Ottawa. “We needed a network to send and receive data for the smart meters and here we are with one of the largest fibre networks in the city - why not extend it with Wi-Fi and read the meters that way?”

Dobbin says it was almost all too obvious. He says the second impetus behind the project came when the City of Toronto sold its street lighting assets to Toronto Hydro Street Lighting Inc., another subsidiary of Toronto Hydro Corp.

Toronto’s hotzone will see hundreds and then thousands of radio antennae attached to the city’s streetlight poles, which threw another learning curveball at Dobbin.

“ The Ottawa experience taught me how these things work, how they’re engineered and what kind of traffic to expect,” he says. “But mounting the antennae on streetlight poles was an entirely new experience.”

In Ottawa, Dobbin says the Wi-Fi network was built on the city’s existing hydro poles, but the Toronto Hydro electric system does not allow radio attachments on hydro poles. “They don’t do it, so we had no option.”

Another technical lesson he learned was how to push Wi-Fi’s reach further with a single access point, using multiple uni-directional antennae rather than one omni-directional antenna.

Typically a Wi-Fi antenna has a range of anything between 15 metres and 50 metres. In beta tests carried out at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Toronto Hydro Telecom team was getting almost 300 metres, or up to the ninth floor of an office building or condominium.

“ With an omni-directional antenna, coverage spreads out like a bubble and it’s generally short-range,” says Dobbin.

One access point might have as many as 16 antennae all pointed at very specific directions, which allows coverage to go a lot further, he says.

Alicia Wanless, an analyst with Toronto-based Seaboard Group, describes the entrepreneurial Dobbin as a visionary. “The grid he made in downtown Ottawa was quite exceptional and it’s exciting that he’s moved to Toronto. He really thinks big and is quite capable of doing big things.”

But Dobbin is quick to play down his role in the project and points to his new engineering staff. “We brought in the wireless talent to get us through,” he says. “At the end of the day, I’m a fibre guy.” He says he wants Toronto Hydro Telecom to work with the established telcos such as Rogers, Bell and Telus, as a member of the Canadian Hotspot Roaming Alliance.

“ Now is not the time for competitive chest-pumping,” says Dobbin.

“ We’re building this to make it available in the city of Toronto and I think all of the carriers should be working together to ensure [users] have access to the technology. We’re building the zone, let’s work together.”

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