Situation Analysis

What are the reasons FHP Wireless is having diculty in

getting sales and revenues?
There are several reasons why FHP wireless is having diculty in getting sales and
revenues:
From social environmental aspect:
1. Most people holds the opinion that the ubiquitous wifi access cannot
be available under current technology and economics conditions.
2. The FHP wireless's potential customers like airports, Starbucks were
just beginning to deploy hotspots, the time for them to change to FHP
wireless is not acceptable. To abandon the current plan and substitute
with another one would be too expensive.
3. Those companies hold the idea that many hotspots would eventually
have full Wi-Fi coverage. The cost to cover the metro area would be
uneconomic.
4. In the computer industry, most laptops did not the built-in Wi-Fi
capacity, let alone other devices. The whole market demand for this
metro-scale wireless was very weak. The market is just beginning to
form.
The Wi-Fi value chain aspect:
1. The roles in the value chain are missing. No system integrators and no
service providers and the municipalities are also not clear.
2. For the likely-being companies in the chain, the FHP wireless is a new
threat to their existing business but not the profitable point, they can
hardly fit themselves into the value chain without harming their wired
business.
The Marketing and Sales, they cannot target the right customer.
1. They choose to sell to value-added resellers to help them market and
sale their products. However most of the prospects targeted by the
VARs were large enterprise, for whom installing a FHP mesh was more
expensive than the network of standard wireless access points. And
because the poor performance of the marketing and sales, the opinion
that FHP mesh was just a little better but more expensive becomes
more prevalent.

How is FHPs existing product/solution dierentiated from

customers other alternatives?
The FHP's existing product/solution dierentiated from customer's other alternatives
in many aspects:
The product itself is a technology to help build wide-area wireless networks

which can dynamically distribute trac as bandwidth needs changes and

determine the optimal path for wireless clients to access the internet while
hotspots cannot do that.
The FHP's solution has developed a perfect product for metro-level Wi-Fi
which hotspots cannot do.
The FHP's product provides more rapid, plug-and-play deployment, which
current IP router might need more configurations.
The FHP's product is automatic scalable, according to the nodes the optimal
path has involved, the network scale can be adjusted.
The FHP's product provides fault tolerance, even some nodes in the whole
network get into trouble, there still can be steady way to get to the network.
The redundancy mechanism and the ability to re-route can guarantee that the
network is not influenced.
The FHP's product also provides more advanced security for the optimal route
is decided by the algorithm dynamically so it's harder to interrupt the data
transmission.
The FHP's product produces a more complicated network so also provides
more advance network management.
The FHP's solution's cost would be depending on the number of nodes in the
network, but potentially very likely will be more cost-ecient than CDPD and
Motorola radio. And it will be more economical on the long run on the
backhauls.
On the coast-quality aspect, compared with hotspots, motorola radio and
CDPD, the total NPV cost per square mile the FHP is the least while provides
the best performance.

Decisions
Which customer(s) should FHP pursue/target? Why?
I'd like to talk about the Education and Campuses as the target customer. The
reasons are as following:
The on-campus wireless network can be really expensive to build, but the
mesh network would provide a much more economic solution so the university
will be willing to adopt this.
There are many scenarios on the campuses for students to use the wireless
network. Like in the library, in the union, in the dining hall and etc. All the
places must provide a network that can seamless connected together. So
there will always be a demand there.
There also exits the needs for the college campus to have all places covered
by wireless network considering the campus security. So they definitely need a

large-scale, reliable and secure network.

Since there are already wired network on campus, so it will be cost-ecient
for universities to install the equipments necessary to deploy the mesh
network.

How can FHP make its (whole) product more appealing to

those [target] customers?
To be appealing to the universities, FHP should focus on several things.
The communication. To improve the network performance when there were an
event will be makes it more appealing to the university.
Safety. FHP should make sure that his product perform well under any
circumstance. Especially when there is an emergency situation, the network
should also be stable on its speed and availability.
Cost. FHP might need to lower down their product cost, especially the cost for
each node, and this will make its solution more appealing to the universities.