This morning, I was sent the musings of a Toby Keith fan on how WalMart would be the next,Verizon (well, Nextel maybe...or Leap Wireless more likely). This fellow believes that somehow WalMart's 3000 locations IN THE U.S. will provide WiMax access to the homes in America. Of course he was not the first person this week to consider this idea, it's been bubbling around a few blogs and wireless news feeds. Look folks, according to the CTIA there are close to 175,000 cell sites in the U.S. If you assume these are evenly divided (they are not) by the top 7 carriers - who carry >90% of all mobile traffic, that's 25,000 RF sites EACH.

Sorry, even neglecting the challenges of customer care, dead zones, spectrum, etc., this does not compute. WalMart IS a great retailer: it would be a great place to puchase a self-install device, a great place to pay your bill, and yes, an option in a portion of the backhaul/POPs for a carrier. What WalMart needs is a network - not a few mega-stores - in a typical populated area. Moreover, to beef up coverage, WalMart (realizing this as the wireless gurus they are) would need to put up 10X the number of cell sites as they have stores. Great idea! Can you hear it in the board room now? ("look, we haven't pissed off enough activists in local communities yet..let's install an extra 10 cell towers near each of our stores").

WalMart offering telecom services? interesting idea. Walmart constructing and operating their own WiMax network? ludicrous.

And speaking of Pervasive Broadband (see below), where the hell is it? It's not anywhere I've been in the past few months except in good old San Diego. Not at Lake Tahoe. Not in France during Le Tour. Not on Highway 395 (photo above I snapped while driving an RV) Boy you don't know how Addicted you are until you lose your fix.

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking earlier this year at a San Diego Telecom Council event with Dr. David Hutches from UCSD. David is ideall situated as a computer science researcher who has responsibility for the wireless network on campus, and he teaches as well. He spoke at length (a lively speaker, I might add) on the activities that UCSD is engaging in with broadband on campus.


The applications that UCSD has developed that use both WiFi and EV-DO (WWAN) technology range from mobile "bubbles" that are essentially moving access points, to a cybershuttle (a faster moving bubble) that picks up students and faculty from the local train station as well as shuttling them around campus, to a link to campus roaming robot - shown above - that interacts with humans. The last project seemed particularly interesting (with somewhat unclear practical commercial applicaitons yet - maybe that's the appeal). This project, with a host of other, have been conducted at the Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab at UCSD.