I want to begin this piece, especially in light of the title above, on a positive note - indeed, I think everything below is positive if read in the proper light. Regardless, failure is often a critical element in success. I find it sad that our education system - and our society overall - doesn't reward risk-taking to a great enough degree. Think about the guy (or girl) who discovered just how useful fire could be. He or she probably died from the infection resulting from third-degree burns. But successive generations clearly profited from early failures, and, assuming that our fire-tamer lived, he or she might have gone on to invent the wheel, and perhaps retire on a beach somewhere.

We should, in fact, be eternally grateful to those who fail because they make success so much easier for the rest of us. Knowing what not to do is at least as important as knowing what works, and we won't know what works until we try. I'm always suspicious of people who never fail. It might indeed be that they are a lot smarter than the rest of us. But it might also be that they just don't try very hard, and simply note what someone else did wrong and make a small correction. Truly great leaps, however, often involve great failure. There is, for example, the story of how Edison tried literally thousands of filaments before achieving success with the light bulb. And as long as failure isn't the result of outright stupidity, we should be thankful that someone took a risk and showed us, at the very least, which path not to pursue.

So, with that as a preface, let's look at some of the notable failures in wireless of the past couple of years and attempt to learn something from these contributions:

The first is Vivato, often lumped in with the wireless switch crowd, but in reality the purveyors of something far different. Vivato actually got started using phased-array antennas on wireless LAN access points. A phased array is a flat panel antenna with many active elements that can be aligned and even steered in a given direction, making the phased array one mighty antenna indeed. They're a little pricey, but quite useful in radar and even cellular base-station applications. So, why not use them on wireless LANs? Vivato reasoned that it could cover a large area very cheaply relative to the cost of installing multiple APs.

Alas, as I have noted many times, more range is a bad idea in most cases, and this is one of them. Trying to share a single Wi-Fi channel over a large area means low throughput if multiple users are involved. The more users, the more sharing, and the less performance all will see. Couple this with advances in wireless meshes, and Vivato was doomed. The company did try to shift gears to become a metro-scale Wi-Fi supplier, but it was too late. Having an interim management team also didn't help.

Lesson: Inappropriate technology, no mater

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