Brian et all, well you can all thank Fleet Financial for destroying CVUS funding options,or Shant for thinking that a bank has visionaries,isn't that an oxymoronic statement? Banks are filled with narrow thinking,conservative pinheads.
Well,LMDS will someday be a great technology,
LMDS: Lurking in the background
But perhaps the greatest potential threat to traditional cable TV operators will be those who bid and won licenses in the recent LMDS auction. While the much-anticipated and oft-delayed auction didn't live up to the revenue projections some expected, the 128-round auction will net the government a bit more than $578 million.
LMDS spectrum is being made available in two blocks per trading area.
All told, the FCC will issue licenses for 483 basic trading areas with a total of 1.3 GHz of spectrum per trading area. Two licenses for each area will be available: one for 1.15 GHz (block A) and another for 150 MHz (block B).
The auction actually resulted in 104 bidders winning a total of 864 licenses. A total of 379 A licenses were sold, covering 90 percent of the U.S. population, and 485 B licenses were sold, covering 99.5 percent of the population. Unsold licenses will be r e-auctioned later, according to FCC officials.
With that much bandwidth available, LMDS can certainly deliver a wide variety of services. What remains unclear, however, is whether a provider can make money offering services that are similar to those that already exist, over a network of towers that so me analysts suggest will cost at least $500,000 for the first two-way cell, which covers five to 10 square miles. Additional cells are expected to cost much less because they essentially consist of little more than receivers and repeaters.
To date, the only existing LMDS operator is CellularVision of New York, which pioneered the technology and actually launched commercial cable TV-like service in Brighton Beach. There, customers pay $19.95 a month for a basic package of 31 cable stations, about 30 percent less than basic service from CableVision and Time Warner. The 12,000 customers CellularVision purports to have use tiny roof-top (or window- mounted) antennas, and set-top boxes connect their TVs and personal computers to the network.
Although CellularVision apparently intends to continue operating in New York, it did not pursue licenses to operate elsewhere. Instead, it plans to offer other LMDS operators advice and consulting services for a fee.
As for potential, the service could be the breakthrough technology that allows a single provider to easily offer the full suite of communication and entertainment services, according to analysts. Some reports suggest LMDS could be a billion-dollar industry in five years.
Of course, that will depend on the LMDS license winners actually coming to market with real services. Already, on the hardware side, there has been a shake-out. Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard, which both developed LMDS systems, sold them (to Bosch Telecom and Lucent, respectively).
The other question is financial wherewithal. Big-name telcos and cable companies were barred from buying licenses for fear they'd simply stockpile the licenses without building the networks. Some observers doubt that small companies will be able to raise the necessary capital to build the networks, however.
Despite the fact that LMDS can send video and voice signals, most people are betting on LMDS as a high-speed data play. LMDS can be used to interconnect local area networks, create campus area networks and serve as a medium for asynchronous transfer mode and Sonet. With an asymmetrical pipe that can operate at 1.5 Gbps downstream and 200 Mbps upstream, even during peak hours, the system would yield 7 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream per household, according to research performed by Hew-lett-Packard.
Outside the U.S., interest in LMDS is high. Countries that simply don't have a modern telecommunications infrastructure see wireless as an affordable means of leapfrogging into the 21st century.
-- Roger Brown
Hiram |
