A View on View :: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

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Mark Evans

the blog - examines the world of telecom and technology from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

the person - lives in Toronto, CA with his wife and three children, and works as director of community with PlanetEye Inc.

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Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Mark Evans on Tue 13 Jun 2006 05:14 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Toronto Hydro plans to roll out a Wi-Fi network throughout downtown Toronto this year. The question is what markets it has targeted. Is it going after the high-speed Internet access market or the wireless market, or both? Toronton Hydro Telecom CEO Dave Dobbin provided a glimpse of his strategy during a presentation at the Canadian Telecom Summit when his mobile phone started to ring halfway through. The staged "stunt" was made to demonstrate how Toronto Hydro could provide free wireless phone service using Wi-Fi and SIP. The way Dobbin sees it, there would be no need to use any of your expensive cellular minutes while in Toronto. People who use the service would also be use their home or office telephone numbers while away from home. This strategy sounds like good news for Skype or Vonage but troubling news for Rogers, Telus and Bell. If anything, Dobbin is doing a good job of being a sh#$-disturber.

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Comments

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Stephen Hayward on Tue 13 Jun 2006 05:35 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The Telco Industry is a great place to witness dissruptive innovation at it's finest.

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Aaron Ford on Wed 14 Jun 2006 02:26 AM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I love sh#$-disturbers.

Entwhistle at Telus says their hedge against falling wireline revenues is wireless. Maybe by selling clips of Telus idol?

Projects like this can cut into many of the ILEC's different revenue streams at the same time. What fun.

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Anonymous on Wed 14 Jun 2006 08:06 AM EDT | Permanent Link

A sh** disturber, as in he is full of sh**? Difficult (and expensive) to run voice over WLAN in a corporate envitonment, never mind in a public MESH. This is the problem when you get a snake poil salesman running the show...

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Anonymous on Wed 14 Jun 2006 09:47 AM EDT | Permanent Link

I'm sorry Mark that you provided a platform for TH to demonstrate its cavalier approach. And if their downtown mesh network works as slowly as the one at the telecom summit, the telcos/cableco won't have anything to worry about.

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Aaron Ford on Wed 14 Jun 2006 07:32 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I'm sorry but if you think the CEO of THT is a snake-oil salesman, than you haven't met enough snake-oil salesmen!

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Anonymous on Mon 19 Jun 2006 11:12 AM EDT | Permanent Link

Hold onto your seats, I was there, uploading to the internet at 8.9 Mbps! Enough for voip and a little bit more i'm sure.

Re: Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Ross on Mon 19 Jun 2006 02:19 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

It will provide superb performance when hardly anyone is using it! Problem is, that wifi and related technologies are based on the notion of a shared resource. The more people use it, the less that is available for each user. Under moderate to heavy usage scenarios, performance will suffer and VoIP won't be practical. Of course, they could restrict access in order to support reasonable VoIP, but that is up to TH to determine how they want this network to be used.

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Sandy Ward on Wed 06 Sep 2006 12:48 PM EDT | Permanent Link

It is funny today, Silicon Valley announced free Wireless in the Valley.

Toronto Hydro is going to sell it to TO... sigh...one day TO will be a leading city...

http://www.thtelecom.ca/zone-qa.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/technology/06wireless.html?ex=1315195200&en=bf47cde2dc953b89&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Re: Toronto Hydro's Wireless Plans

by Anonymous on Fri 17 Aug 2007 11:08 PM EDT | Permanent Link

Ah yes, Dave... a true 'wireless' village idiot !

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\n"; #File retrieval failed - exiting function pass back old values. return $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); } #TODO - Replace with file retrieval $ad_params = $this->GetParameters($AdFilePath); $new_ad_params = $this->_newRowPosition($ad_params); #TODO - Add SlidingExpiration for REFRESH Dates that dont change # Example: REFRESH DATE permanently affixed to 2 days prior, every 30sec refresh will attempt a new page download # Temp Solution is to UPDATE FILE_DATE with AD_ROTATE_DATE $new_ad_params["AD_FILEDATE"] = $new_ad_params["AD_ROTATEDATE"]; #echo "Writing new ad
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\n"; return $new_ad_params; } } /** BEGIN Backwards Compatibility Routines */ if (! function_exists('array_combine')) { function array_combine($keys, $values) { foreach($keys as $key) $out[$key] = array_shift($values); return $out; } } if (!function_exists('fputcsv')) { function fputcsv($filePointer, $dataArray, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { // Write a line to a file // $filePointer = the file resource to write to // $dataArray = the data to write out // $delimeter = the field separator // Build the string $string = ""; // No leading delimiter $writeDelimiter = FALSE; foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) { // Replaces a double quote with two double quotes $dataElement=str_replace("\"", "\"\"", $dataElement); // Adds a delimiter before each field (except the first) if($writeDelimiter) $string .= $delimiter; // Encloses each field with $enclosure and adds it to the string $string .= $enclosure . $dataElement . $enclosure; // Delimiters are used every time except the first. $writeDelimiter = TRUE; } // end foreach($dataArray as $dataElement) // Append new line $string .= "\n"; // Write the string to the file return fwrite($filePointer,$string); } } if (!function_exists('fgetcsv')) { #TODO - Remove or ??? #Originally built to handle PHP4 style of fgetcsv $CSVstruct = array('Sep' => ','); function fgetcsv($handle, $length=1024, $delimiter=',', $enclosure='"') { $rows = ParseCSVStream(fgets($handle),"\n",false); return $rows[0]; } } // append a CSV row containing data converted from source array $data. Actual conversion is done by ExCSVRowWalker() function AppendCSVRow($data) { global $CSVstruct; array_walk($data,'ExCSVRowWalker'.($CSVstruct['OutEOL']=="\n"?'N':'')); $CSVstruct['File'] .= implode($CSVstruct['Sep'],$data).$CSVstruct['OutEOL']; } // returns an array of rows (each row being an array of columns) with parsed data. Returns false when conversion fails. Auto-detects Win/Mac/*nix newline characters, which are converted all to the sequence specified (defaults to $CSVstruct['OutEOL']) for your convenience. function ParseCSVStream($data, $newline="\n", $associative=true) { global $CSVstruct; $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\r","\n",str_replace("\r\n","\n",$data)); if ($newline!="\n") $CSVstruct['File'] = str_replace("\n",$newline,$CSVstruct['File']); $CSVstruct['OutEOL'] = $newline; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = 0; $CSVstruct['Error'] = false; $CSVstruct['EOF'] = false; $res = array(); if ($associative) { $titles = ParseCSVRow(); while (($row = ParseCSVRow())!==false) { $newa = array(); //possible optimization: might use array_combine() - requires PHP 5 for ($col = 0; $col0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',str_replace($CSVstruct['OutEOL'],"\n",$item)).'"'; } function ExCSVRowWalkerN(&$item) { if (!is_numeric($item)&&(strlen($item)>0)) $item = '"'.str_replace('"','""',$item).'"'; } // read next line from buffer. function RowInput() { global $CSVstruct; if ($CSVstruct['EOF']) { return ""; } else { $pos = strpos($CSVstruct['File'], $CSVstruct['OutEOL'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); if ($pos===false) { $CSVstruct['EOF'] = true; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$CSVstruct['Seek']); } else { $pos1 = $CSVstruct['Seek']; $CSVstruct['Seek'] = $pos+1; return substr($CSVstruct['File'],$pos1,$pos-$pos1); }; }; } /** Initialize ad_network variable */ $ad_logic = new ad_logic($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); $ad_network = $ad_logic->ad_network($PATH_TO_AD_FILE); ?>