Hi, I am sure some of you read my posting on my waiting to receive reliable Internet when at home and more recently my issues with safaricom on installation of a Wimax connection. In the same breath I have been questioning the rational of using wireless solutions in Nairobi where we have such a density of consumers which could explain the issues being raised by ISPs about lowering Internet charges due to unfactored costs in landing the fibre optic cable. I grew up in buru buru estate and now that I think about it there where very few overhead power lines and the ones that where there feed directly to the substations and transformer rooms. Where I currently live today in South C the situation is the same. But when you visit estates like Umoja innercore, Runda, Karen there is a lot of overhead power lines in the case of Umoja it is because of bad planning while in the other 2 it due to the sparseness of the units. Therefore as an analogy the over head lines is wireless connectivity and the underground cabling your fibre & copper solutions. When CCK raise issues about BTS sharing and NEMA keep screaming about radiation the ISPs continue to increase the amount of radio traffic in our airwaves one antennae at a time. As I write this I am seated in the office at Phoenix house and can see 5 wireless devices, across at Standard House there are over 13 of them three quarters of which are facing the same direction indicating that are connecting to the same base station. I do not envy the person responsible for customer service of that network and also the upgrades that will soon be required as one sector gets congested yet another is underutilised. Even as I wait for the finally commissioning of my Wimax installation by Safaricom at home I wonder would it not have been more cost effective to deliver a fibre optic cable to the estate (which for you information is fully ducted for low voltage services from the cab into each house) and provide all the 150 houses with a wired solution. If we think through some of the solutions we implement we can do more with what we have, the hire customer density on a fibre node will reduce per unit cost and increase profitability for the provider thus allowing him to offer wireless solutions for the more spreadout locations with lower densities. Our fear of Telkom's history where a land line would be out of service for months on end with excuses such cable has been cut or we have no drop wire. Today even Telkom is offering those with landlines an automatic wireless line fail-over in the event of the cable getting cut. Using Wimax to cover less than 4 kilometre distances is like killing a fly with a sledge hammer. Regards Robert Yawe KAY System Technologies Ltd Phoenix House, 6th Floor P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200 Kenya Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696