Vendors Eagerly Anticipate Lucrative, Emerging
Market
By Peggy Albright
The year 2000 will be the year for
point-to-multipoint wireless technologies.
Local multipoint
distribution services licensees in the United
States, many still selecting
technologies and vendors,
will begin delivering high-bandwidth services to
customers seeking that last mile
of connectivity.
The technology offers a modular,
build-as-your-revenue-grows approach that
won't break the
bank. Startup companies can more easily enter
the market and quickly challenge
incumbent
carriers.
Rick Miskiman, vice president for strategic
customer development at Newbridge
Networks, said
an initial investment typically requires less than a
couple hundred thousand
dollars. "It's a strategic
decision, not a million-dollar decision," he
added.
The LMDS market opportunity is huge. "We
look at this as a
marketplace that's going to be several billion
dollars over the next
three to five years," said Elizabeth Stites,
director of
communications at Netro Corp., considered the
first vendor to
market true point-to-multipoint technology.
"We're looking at a
70 percent annual growth rate in this area."
With a buildout curve as steep as experts are
predicting, however, the
availability of equipment on
demand could be a constraining factor.
A case in point is radios, according to Miskiman,
whose company has adopted a
radio-independent
architecture to ensure the flexibility to work in
any frequency band and to serve
carriers offering
multichannel multipoint distribution services as
well.
While there are probably a good dozen or so
radio manufacturers available to
LMDS vendors,
Miskiman said, the industry is still transitioning
to serve this market and has not
yet reached the
stage where quality radios can be manufactured
in the volumes required to
achieve the price points
needed by the market.
The upshot? While LMDS vendors have the
capability to deploy these modular
systems faster and
at lower cost than wireline, radios cannot be
obtained overnight for companies
that decide to
accelerate their buildout schedule in
mid-stream--a potential problem for vendors
that have
specified availability of equipment in their bids.
Vendors serving the LMDS market can be
categorized in two groups: systems
integrators and
broadband wireless access technology
developers.
Systems integrators offer one-stop shopping for
end-to-end services that will set
up broadband
equipment on a customer's premises, ensure
high-speed wireline connections all
the way to the
end-user and back to the telephone carrier's
central office. In contrast,
developers serve large
telecommunications companies that need
additional access to local markets as
well as systems
integrators serving the operator community.
How is the vendor landscape shaping up?
Systems integrator Newbridge Networks has five
domestic contracts and another
five in
international markets. Newbridge has built its
product line in part with Stanford
Telecommunications wireless access equipment
and is now in the process of
acquiring that
company. Newbridge's international contracts
include Canadian carrier MaxLink
Communications, Inc. which has a national
license to serve Toronto, Ottawa,
Montreal and
Calgary.
Lucent Technologies has an LMDS product
called OnDemand.
This portfolio of services integrates
point-to-multipoint equipment that Lucent has
obtained under an
original equipment manufacturing agreement
with San Jose,
Calif.-based Netro. Lucent has not yet
announced contracts in this country,
but is deploying OnDemand equipment for
COMSAT Peru.
It has announced an agreement with Bellevue,
Wash.-based Advanced Radio
Telecom Corp. to build a network in Oslo,
Norway, for a pilot program that will
use asynchronous transfer mode as well as
Internet protocol.
Nortel Networks refers to its portfolio of LMDS
services as its Reunion platform.
This company
has had something of a head start deploying
broadband services in this country--it
supplies
equipment and network integration services to
pre-LMDS-auction broadband
licensee Teligent,
which has exclusive use of the 24 MHz band.
Nortel has yet to announce
contracts to LMDS A- or
B-Block licensees in this country.
Broadband wireless access technology
vendors--those developing the equipment
and partnering
with channel providers to integrate their
equipment into full network
systems--include companies
offering current access approaches.
Netro Corp., claims more than a dozen
deployments around the
world, partnering with systems
integrators Lucent Technologies and Siemens.
Netro differentiates
itself from other BWA
providers, in part, by its patented media access
layer, called
CellMAC, which allows the
technology to dynamically allocate bandwidth to
subscribers.
Two startups in this business, Wavtrace Inc. and
Ensemble, are targeting U.S.
B-block carriers
with next-generation technologies designed to
maximize spectral efficiency for
these carriers' 75-
megahertz allocations, while also marketing to
A-Block and international
licensees. Their systems
also provide dynamic allocation of bandwidth,
through a different approach than
Netro's.
A chunk of business awaits the company tapped
by Craig McCaw's
NextLink Communiations Inc., which owns most
of the LMDS
licenses in the top U.S. markets. Predictably,
NextLink--whose
decisions could shape the LMDS vendor
landscape--is not tipping
its hand.
If NETRO get's tapped by Nextlink... KATY bar
the Door!
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