Toronto Hydro name Siemens as the vendor for Toronto' Wireless Mesh

Well here goes... Toronto Hydro has name Siemens Communications Group, a division of Siemens Canada Ltd., as the vendor of record for equipment supply, implementation and services in support of its plan to make Toronto the largest ubiquitous Wi-Fi zone in Canada.

Oh Boy. There are at least 3 commercial mesh vendor's in Canada and the city of Toronto choose Siemens. I have been following wireless mesh for a number of years now and I can tell you that I have not heard of Siemens deploying wireless mesh anywhere. They aren't a player in the Mesh market place! The only thing I can remember them doing is investing about 10 million into obscure wireless mesh company in California.

Now if Nortel/Bell won the contract then you would know it was a political decision. Nortel, Bellair, Firetide, Wi-Lan etc. are all good Canadian Companies. But Siemens? Who are they kidding. Siemens is a large company but they don't have a track record of deploying Wireless Mesh. If they did everyone one would be talking about them.

Now it comes to Best Practices. What Best Practices? What model are Siemens going to use to deploy this network? I can tell you that the for mentioned Canadian companies all have the necessary experience to deploy a successful wireless mesh.

But Siemens, they must have written a great RFP response. You know when people start to fluff things ups with bandwidth and monitoring and excellence it all becomes good reading.

Now that Siemens is going to deploy Wireless Mesh I have a challenge for some rich guy or girl out their to invest in my company and we will beat Toronto Hydro or the City of Toronto and deploy the entire city in less than a year at one quarter the cost of the RFP. You know I was the first to have Wireless Mesh in Toronto. I believe Toronto Hydro is Johnny coming lately.

But even though this blog sounds negative and tries to avoid the smell of another MFP scandal I'm glad that things are moving along. Too bad Siemens will be using the Toronto Taxpayers Money to experiment with deploying wireless mesh. Sorry I had to get that in. All I can wish is for a successful deployment and I hope that the equipment that they choose has been tested. No name vendor equipment, gosh darn they could have ask me to build an open source version. Probably would have been better.