Ottawa Citizen Overview of Wireless Market
There is a great Overview on the Wireless market in the Ottawa Citizen today. Here is the link.
ottawacitizen.com
It's nice to see they include an article of Plaintree in the Overview as they are meeting the needs of one facet of this booming market.
ottawacitizen.com
Other key reads are the one on general overview "Tracking the Wireless World" and the one on Alcatel "Alcatel Tries to Bridge the Digital Divide"
Seeing how Alcatel has been mentioned as one of the companies that has been through Plaintree's facilities I thought I would post some of the more interesting parts of the Alcatel article.
Alcatel's fixed wireless customers are the service providers who need to bridge that tantalizing last few kilometres to the end user, usually a small- or medium-sized company which needs to provide broadband Internet access to its employees.
Those customers are all over the world, and include some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. "Globally, we have about 100 clients," Mr. Hendry says.
In South Korea, Hanaro Telecom is using Alcatel's fixed wireless technology to go head-to-head against the country's incumbent telecom giant, Korea Telecom. In Germany, Collina Telecom uses Alcatel technology to compete with long-established Deutsche Telecom. (That contract alone, Mr. Hendry says, is worth $200 million.)
"We're in the lead position, No. 1 globally, in terms of the number of customers we're serving," she says. No one else, in other words, has as many as 100 customers.
Sure would be nice to partner up with the leader in the # of customers basis.
"You could truly say that fixed wireless is fibre-like in its capacity to deliver bandwidth," Mr. Brazeau says. Most fibre delivers from 10 to 155 megabits per second. To be sure, fixed wireless doesn't match the high-end of that range, but it can deliver bursts of up to 40 megabits per second. "And that's certainly well up there," Mr. Brazeau quickly adds.
The ADSL service that many telecom companies offer yields far more modest burst of only two megabits per second. The speeds offered by cable companies are, as he says, in the same general range.
Fixed wireless also has the advantage of quick and cheap installation. To extend a fibre line to a building, for example, can take months, by the time official permissions are given, streets are dug up, and the fibre is laid to ground. Once a bay station is in place, however, a building within the three- to five-kilometre transmission range can be equipped to receive Internet signal within half a day or less.
Now after reading this take a look at this section of the StockHouse Interview with watson from September 11, 2000 stockhouse.ca
StockHouse: Your product line is focused on LED in competition to lasers. Are there any issues of safety when using lasers?
Watson: Our LED technology is completely eye safe. It is nothing more than a ray of light that is non-specific and non-concentrated. It's the same ray of light that you will get from your remote control on your TV set. It is not laser. Everybody else is dealing in laser and some companies may indicate that their lasers are eye safe, but I challenge anyone to go to a CEO of that company and say 'here's a pair of binoculars, look at your laser' and I'm sure you'll find them all declining.
StockHouse: Now you say it's only in the last two years that the demand for this technology has really begun to take off. What is driving this demand?
Watson: It is really the Internet and the cellular phone markets that are driving the huge interest in the optical wireless market right now. There is a need for wide-band connectivity and solutions that don't have frequency problems. That all points to optical wireless and optical fibreless. The other thing, which people are overlooking, is the fact that we have one of the most reliable switches on the market. When we go to customers, unlike everybody else, we say, here's your complete solution right from the main trunk through to your bay station, we give you the switch and the link.
StockHouse: Why are the big companies not using LED?
Watson: Everybody else is concentrating on laser right now, and it's because every company is pushing for gigabit and terabyte speeds. To get to those speeds, you need laser. But, the bulk of the market right now is looking for 155 megabit and less. That's easily attainable by LED. A number of issues that are surfacing include the fact that laser is very difficult to align, LED is much easier to align. Laser is also very susceptible to environmental conditions; LED is much less susceptible to environmental conditions. The third big issue is that laser has health risks associated with it, which LED does not.
StockHouse: At 155 megabits, will this be old technology two years down the road?
Watson: No, because as soon as we get our LED solutions underway, we will be working on the laser solution. We will have within one year, competitive laser products in the market.
StockHouse: So you're doing laser as well?
Watson: Absolutely, but the bulk of the market right now is more than adequately serviced with LED. LED is an extremely strong alternative to laser.
StockHouse: What percentage of the market would you say can be serviced by LED right now?
Watson: I would have to say probably 80% of the potential market right now is at speeds of 155 megabits per second or less.
StockHouse: Does that reduce drastically from year to year?
Watson: No, the customer that we have in here right now is a very large customer out of Europe, potentially. He's saying that he thinks that a year from now he will be hoping to move 10 to 12 gigabit lasers a year and his potential volume right now in 155 megabits is in the hundreds, if not the thousands per month. That will give you some kind of idea.
StockHouse: When will the new optical wireless product be released into the market?
Watson: We are hoping that the initial units will be ready for shipment to our customers by Christmas. I'm hoping early 2001, we should see the first real contract potential beginning to show.
StockHouse: Do you have potential customers who have already shown interest in this product?
Watson: Right now we have customers waving large potential orders under our nose saying, 'Get us the product, if we like it, this is yours.' They are very hot for the product right now. There is an immediate demand for it, and we are definitely one of the leading competitors for this business.
StockHouse: Where is this interest coming from, potential buyers in Canada or the US or global?
Watson: It's global. It's Asia, England, Europe, Middle East, South America, US.
It kind of makes you go hmmmmmmmm doesn't it!!!
PJD |
