Andy Abramson continues to turn over rocks and learn about new partnerships and strategies that alter the landscape of the competitive marketplace. Those of us who know Andy well have seens his revitalization of late to really attack some of the hot activity in the tech sector. It's good to see Andy back with a vengeance at unearthing some of the most interesting news stories.

The Mother of All Fixed Mobile Convergence Plays
AT&T has made a move into the Muni WiFi space, meaning things are really getting very interesting.

For the longest time the MuniWiFi space was being dominated by little known startups who built things from scratch, serving as quasi integrators even though the big telcos and cable guys already had enough fiber in the ground to make the build outs really easy. They already have the rights of way, so all the municipalities have to do is make it easy and provide utility poles or places to locate the WiFI access points. For the last half a dozen years or so I have always wondered why the cable MSO's with already existing municipal relationships didn't just give this stuff to the cities? They already had the relationships and the rights of way. And certainly they have the connectivity. In a lot of ways, they just waited to long, though I do know that with Jim Tobin, an ex AOL Voice VP, now involved in strategy at Comcast, that Comcast is not totally asleep at the switch even though they still are smarting from their loss to Earthlink in their own back yard, and my home town of Philadelphia.

Like Andy, I'm not at all surprised to see AT&T  follow the Google and Earthlink strategies. It's a counter to the cable providers, who've been making steady inroads at eroding AT&T's customer base for quite some time. Fixed mobile convergence is one tactic to recapture and recover those customers, who in some areas are leaving the incumbents like lemmings follow the Pied Piper.

I strongly support one observation Andy made -

The company that can offer devices and technology as well as solutions that let both hemisphere's work in tandem, with  handoffs and handover between them, and to the Mobile world, willreally be the winner.

That company right now is BridgePort Networks. I've intereviewed them here and if you search back, you'll find some really innovative approaches they're taking to giving users what they need in terms of communications tools.

Andy says AT&T and MetroFi just became significant players. The truth is, AT&T is always a significant player, but not always the leader or the innovator. The days of AT&T leading with innovation are an echo from the distant past.

I used to live in Riverside, CA, the first city to get servcie frmo this new alliance. While they could have picked a sleepier, quieter place to deploy, it's not a completely dead zone. The Univiersity of California at Riverside puts a base of college students smack into this service offering. And while college students make a great trial audience for something like FMC, the schools focus on agriculture won't produce the same sort of audience or demand a tech school like Stanford or MIT would.

As Om notes, this is a huge deal for Metro Fi. They've been working hard in areas like Portland and San Jose and their work is now starting to pay off as they gain critical mass.

Certainly this all validates the MetroFi movement, but that's not new. It's newly visible and taking on different forms with the big names entering the fray, but it isn't new. Muni fiber and wireless efforts have been a very hot business for the past five years. They haven't been widely talked about because they've been flying below the radar as locally managed and implemented efforts funded with RUSS grant funds from the Fed, and mostly in rural areas. If you look, you'll find dozens and dozens of thee projects around the country in areas that just aren't in the news every day.

Fiber and wireless technologies have been inching through rural municipalities for a number of years. But AT&T and the other behemoth players aren't interested in wiring small communities in rural states. They're only focused on significant measurable revenue. Riverside may be a fair pilot, but it's only the proximity to Los Angeles that makes it a market that AT&T cares about.

And let's not forget that AT&T, led by Ed Whitacre, is one of those companies who views the Internet as a potential walled garden of traffic control in the big Net Neutrality debate. Whether they're really serious about staying in the game remains to be seen. They'd rather invent a new game that nobody else can play. And for them, swallowing MetroFi isn't even a big bite. I'll be interested to see where this is in 8 months.


Technorati Tags: AT&T, MetroFi, fixed mobile convergence, FMC