Chicagoania

I am far from an expert on the Restaurant and Bar Business segments but as a long time resident of Chicago in various areas packed with these establishments from Wrigleyville to Bucktown to River North I am at least a frequent regular qualified to throw my 2 cents in. I hadn’t thought too much about the economics of this until I talked to a friend who recently opened two great pizza places where he is the owner about what you get when you buy a used restaurant.

You get nothing… you have to re-model and start over the food concept. And when you sell, the next guy does the same.

What makes a good restaurant as a business? There are a lot of variables and I am only speculating, but certainly timing and location are key elements. For instance you have the Twisted Spoke, a bar on Grand Avenue in what used to be a pretty sketchy part of town that is rapidly gentrifying, and they have the iconic “skeleton on a motorcycle” on permanent rotation in front. This bar has survived for a long time with a mix of hipster / biker cool, an astoundingly good drink / beer mix, and surprisingly good food and interesting / witty / iconic employees. I’d bet that back in the day this place was actually full of bikers but nowadays the crowd looked like the usual hipsters in plaid shirts. And don’t forget the enormous benefit of a rooftop – it astounds me how many bars / restaurants ignore the fact that Chicago people LOVE to sit outside during the few nice days that we receive every year and they drink like fish and eat until they can’t even move.

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Things that are often obvious in hindsight don’t seem so clear at the time. For instance I didn’t understand why anyone would want to send around a PDF file when you had Microsoft Word. And it wasn’t obvious to me that mobile phones would completely displace land lines.

We are about to see something similar happen to the cable industry, which is at its oligopolist apex right now.  I don’t know when or how long it will take to have an effect, but in the end I believe that the outcome will be significant.

MICROWAVE FIXED WIRELESS

For large condominium buildings in Chicago, it is now the norm, not the exception, to go with Microwave Fixed Wireless for internet in the building, rather than fiber. Here is one company (I just found them on the internet, don’t know anything about them) that attempts to describe the benefits:

Telephone and cable companies have been positioning fiber optics as the ultimate internet technology for some time, but the truth is that fiber has some inherent disadvantages that have been addressed by wireless microwave-based internet solutions. Experts across the globe are starting to acknowledge what the engineers at JAB Broadband have long been touting: microwave is a faster, lower latency, lower cost alternative to fiber and you don’t have to wait until someone decides to light up your building.

Not to be confused with the appliance you use for heating your leftovers, microwave wireless networks transmit and receive radio signals through the air enabling high-speed data transmission with very limited latency. Benefits include:

Limited infrastructure required on site
Faster speeds because data travels over a direct path (point-to-point)
Low logistical and operation costs
Expanded availability
Low latency

There are many companies in Chicago that provide this service for condominium buildings and businesses. You need to have a rooftop with line of sight access to a provider and you put a dish on the roof. This dish connects to the main network of the building and is distributed just like internet service that you’d receive from a standard fiber optics provider (such as a cable company). The traditional downside of microwave transmission was unreliability – if the line of sight was obscured by heavy rain, for instance, then you don’t receive any signal. This happens today with DirectTV if the weather is bad – you receive the “all or part of this program did not record” message when you pull it up on your DVR (or it is jumpy and impossible to watch if you are looking at “live” programming). Note that DirectTV has a much more complex problem to fix with its satellites than a condo building does in Chicago because their satellites are in orbit rather than nearby with simple line of sight needs, so these problems are conceptually similar but actually very different in terms of difficulty to solve.

The reliability issue has mostly been solved and barring catastrophic weather, your point to point wireless internet is as reliable as fiber brought into your building. Don’t forget that fiber, too, can be cut by local construction crews and other means and is also susceptible to failures of various sorts.

Once you cut over to Fixed Wireless (microwave transmission), you have effectively moved out of the cable orbit as far as internet service.  Many facilities offer 10 meg, 50 meg, and even 100 meg connections for each condo unit, which means that the provider needs to bring that speed times the number of units with some overall reduction since everyone won’t be using the full internet all the time.

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