TescoMax

Or Great Couples (part V) Tesco and WiMax.

I made a comment over on GigaOm about rollout of WiMax networks. There was another comment and general consensus that building a network would be expensive. I quoted Swisscom on the fact that their subscribers tend not to move around a lot and make all their calls from 3 cells (around 70%).
What's the relevance, they cried! Well, I'll tell you; we all tend to have fairly well-defined movement patterns and one of the key things we all do (from a movement perspective) is go shopping.
I checked out some statistics and here's what I found:
- About 77% of Tesco's customers travel less than 10 minutes (drive time) to their store (64% for rural areas - N.B. its 89 and 81% at 15 minutes!)
- Tesco has around 700 stores in the UK (Extra, Tesco & Tesco Metro)

Doing the maths on this that means that at an average speed of 60km/h (fast!) then 77% of Tesco's customers live within a 10km radius of their stores. WiMax conservative estimates put range at around 8km in NLOS conditions, which means that even on conservative cell size, it is close to covering those customers in a single cell. I'll make no claims about capacity, or how easy it would be to stick up a transmitter in every Tesco store, but it seems to me you could build a network covering a fairly large proportion of the UK population, not randomly, but a consumer segment, with a fairly limited investment.

How the supermarket chains could use such a service (for it applies equally to other chains) I will leave to your imagination (or ask me and I'll give you my opinion!).

I wonder what area the old telephone exchanges typically covered? (n.b. Pipex was up 16% on 15th March, though fell back yesterday)