Digital Marketing using first and last mile technology.

A significant strategic advantage goes to the provider who controls the "the last mile." The last mile is the final leg of delivering communications connectivity to a resident or customer. In traditional media distribution, the "last mile" is an ISP's strategic bottleneck, and whichever entity controls it has disproportionate control over its competitors and customers. In times when "content" only flows one way, those bottlenecks are critical.

There are a variety of ways to try to control the bottleneck through the last mile. Others try to control the physical lines themselves by providing access to those lines; however, with user-created content (be it in the form of blogs, photos, tags, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.) it is now a two-way content flow. It's not just one-way flow toward the consumer, but also from those myriad "endpoints" back into the Internet.

It is not just the "last mile" that matters, but also the "first mile" as well. The first mile refers to the important link connecting the service provider with the business or residential subscriber. That is, whoever controls the access to the means of user production of content will have symmetric power to those who control the "last mile" of the distribution mechanism.

The first benefit is to Telco's, ISP, and now search engines or any on line advertisers that are fighting over the last mile. Whoever controls the first mile gets "first look" at any new content or new information as it is created and then the first mile provider gets perfect visibility into the user-created information. Yahoo, Google and other search engines are trying to gather this information. Can you image your email having Google style click ads? Getting the first look is a strategic advantage.

A second benefit to first mile control is having digital advertisement. Controlling the first page of any web browser can dominate what advertisements can be viewed. There is a tremendous opportunity to controlling first page. Internet advertising has finally come of age as indicated by rapidly increased spending throughout the world. Traditional effective Internet advertising involves competent web site design, good search engine placement, and appropriate online advertising techniques.

Using these advertisement techniques and control of the last mile provides new advantages compared to using search engines; however, controlling the last mile and making it the first mile in association with local business, regional and national advertisement gives unique opportunities to control advertisement at the login level.

Whether you are looking to create regional marketing, such as, a hotel, restaurant, attraction or nightclub, looking for real estate or mortgage customers, or investigating targeted internet advertising for most any other type of business, the last mile Internet Marketing has the ability to bring in new customers. The benefit in a Wireless Mesh Access Point last mile advertisement is that the call to action is within steps of the wireless mesh node. Traditional Internet advertisers will be at a disadvantage because they cannot get to the last mile.

There are many devices that can control the first mile and last mile wireless mesh access points that have the flexibility of providing many content and controlling access points to the Internet. Most of the devices are a combination of Linux operating systems, wireless and a host of open source software and services. It not only provides a software and hardware package but is also flexible to configure it to take advantage of new business opportunities that proprietary and standard systems lack. It also provides a unique topology that can readily provide many inexpensive nodes that can act as a first mile service.

As an example, the wireless mesh access point has the flexibility of controlling the login page known as the splash page. The splash page traditionally provides advertisements for the ISP through a walled garden to provide information to the customer prior to login into the network. It also provides the ability to have many Access Points that are strategically placed not only for connectivity to the last mile but also provide geographic placement of advertisements. Advertisements can have a call to actions with coupons, time sales, etc that go beyond the walls of the brick and mortar operation.

Another example are coffee shops that traditionally are hot spots now can have a second revenue source in the form of on line advertisements. The additional advertisement does not have to be restricted to HTML type pages but now can also have inserted video. With "first mile" being the Wireless Mesh Access Point, it can now stream video directly to consumer in a last mile scenario. Where the consumer is now only one hop away from the first mile. This gives the viewer wonderful connectivity with high quality motion video through the airways.

Developing a Wireless mesh now gives the opportunity to control the first mile as well as the last mile. This will be welcome news to advertisers as well search engine providers and telecommunication companies.