Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cometa's Wi-Fi Clients Left Scrambling

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 20:14:40 -0400

Cometa's Wi-Fi Clients Left Scrambling
May 24, 2004
By Carol Ellison and Sean Gallagher

Cometa Networks' announcement that it is suspending operations has its
former clients—and the providers who court their business—scrambling to
pick up the service.

Click here to read more about Cometa's decision to pull the plug on
Wi-Fi.
 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1596057,00.asp

Peter Hoedemaker,
vice president of retail at Tully's Coffee, said
Tully's is actively looking for alternatives.
"Everybody is still trying to figure out the
economics of [Wi-Fi]," he said.

"The issue is, where is the revenue stream? We
thought that since Cometa had AT&T, IBM and
Intel behind it, they would have enough
manpower and funding to make a go of it,"
Hoedemaker said.

Speaking with eWEEK by phone last week as he
was leaving a meeting with AT&T, Hoedemaker
said he wasn't certain that AT&T, a stakeholder
in Cometa, would step into the void left by the
company.

"With AT&T's current deal pending with
Cingular, I think they're going to be slower to
move in this market," he said.

Still, there's no shortage of potential replacements for Comet, he said.
"Everybody's looking at this opportunity. I've had between 50 and 100
phone calls since Monday from people who would like to provide some sort
of service."
Has Cometa given its former clients any sort of transition plan? "Zero,"
Hoedemaker said, adding that Tully's is definitely looking for someone
to pick up the Wi-Fi service.

"We're no different than the rest of the retailers looking at this—we're
selling coffee, so this is not a primary driving business for us. But we
have the real estate, the ability to market the service, and a million
customers a week coming through our doors."
The main concern in any transition to a new provider, he said, is the
confusion caused when customers who have already bought service have to
come back in and sign up all over again.

Cometa public relations spokeswoman Jennifer Gehrt, of PR firm Knowledge
Anywhere, said the company is still trying to formulate a transition
plan for its customers.

"In the coming weeks, Cometa is committed to making the transition as
smooth as possible," she said. The decision to close Cometa came so
quickly, she said, that management has not yet had the opportunity to
come up with a plan.
Gehrt said McDonald's award of its entire Wi-Fi installation to Wayport
did not have anything to do with the decision by investors to end
funding of Cometa.

She said it was purely based on what the perceived return on capital
would be from a nationwide rollout of the company's network.

Greg Waring, a lead member of McDonald's Digital Innovations team
responsible for hot-spot service, said the company selected Wayport over
Cometa based on "the strength of its overall offering and the neutral
way in which it does business."
Wayport has signed a variety of roaming agreements that allow
subscribers of partners' services to access those services through
Wayport hot spots.

Click here to read more about troubled trials of wireless technology at
McDonald's.
 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1596179,00.asp

Cometa appeared to be headed for rough waters even before it lost the
McDonald's deployment. AT&T withdrew its backing of the venture in
March, saying that the wholesale hot-spot market was not a business
model it wanted to pursue.
That model has had its share of troubles. Last year, Verizon
Communications lowered its ambitions to deploy public Wi-Fi service
through pay phones in New York City when it announced it would
drastically scale back an earlier plan to deploy Wi-Fi service through
pay phones. The endeavor would have unwired about 300,000 pay phones in
New York.
Commercial hot spots are also under increasing pressure from freely
accessed public hot spots operated by community organizations around the
country, such as NYCWireless, which operates 193 public nodes around New
York City, and SF Wireless in San Francisco.

Cometa's demise is the most recent casualty among public Wi-Fi
providers. Others that tried and failed include MobileStar, Joltage and
HereUAre.

MobileStar slid into bankruptcy in 2001 after deploying 600 hot spots in
Starbucks coffee shops. That network was ultimately consumed by T-Mobile
which now includes hot-spot offerings in its menu of services.
Check out eWEEK.com's Mobile & Wireless Center at
http://wireless.eweek.com for the latest news, reviews and analysis.

Be sure to add our eWEEK.com mobile and wireless news feed to your RSS
newsreader or My Yahoo page
Copyright (c) 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1599184,00.asp

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/61FxlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~-> 

-- 
    "NEXTEL-1 IT'S NOT JUST NEXTEL"
  Note The New address 
Subscribe to Nextel-1: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL-1

  "NEXTEL2 FOR iDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS"
Subscribe to Nextel2: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL2

  "WIRELESS FORUM HOMELAND SECURITY GROUP"
     The Complete Resource for Wireless Homeland Security.
Subscribe to WFHSG:  http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/WFHSG

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEXTEL-1/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     [email-masked]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/