Microwave’s tide comes in
Major carriers are embracing microwave as a worthy access vehicle for trumping RBOCs’ grip on the local loop. But is the rebirth of MMDS more than hot air?
americasnetwork.com
By Patrick Neighly
Zen and the Art of Network Management may not be the likeliest title for a telecom tome, but it’s sounding more and more likely as technologies appear to flirt with several incarnations prior to consumer acceptance. Last month America’s Network chronicled the fall and rise of video on demand; this time it’s MMDS (microwave multi-path distribution) to have looked death in the face and come back smiling. After languishing in the hands of hapless wireless cable operators, microwave’s finding a new lease on life as a broadband access technology. Sprint and WorldCom have leapt at the chance to flout the RBOCs’ and cable companies’ grip on DSL and cable modem deployments, building out MMDS networks as quickly as possible in a bid for freedom from the interconnect.
Sprint began consumer trials about a year ago, launching commercial MMDS Internet access service on May 8 with several hundred users in Phoenix. It currently offers service in Tucson, San Jose, Colorado Springs and Denver.
Sprint and WorldCom are both exploring cellularization options, allowing them to break and reuse frequency throughout the same market.
WorldCom is the other major player, taking a lead in trialing service and even deploying commercial networks in the past few months. BellSouth trails a distant third; Nucentrix is the largest independent multiple-market operator. Networks are a combination of owned MMDS spectrum and leased ITFS channels, all in the 2.1 GHz and 2.5 GHz to 2.6 GHz area. (Institutional Television Fixed Service is spectrum owned by universities and other educational institutions.)
WorldCom has commercial deployments in Jackson, Miss. and Baton Rouge, La. In addition, it launches a flagship network in Memphis this month.
35 mile radius
MMDS fixed wireless broadband access is a point to multi-point system, meaning that a company can erect a tower in the middle of town and hit homes and businesses in a radius of about 35 miles.
Sprint deploys a super cell architecture (see Figure), generally with a single tower in town. Some markets, like Phoenix, have two. The towers are erected in the highest possible location — Sprint built atop South Mountain in Phoenix, and San Jose users can look up to see a tower looming on Monument Peak.
"If you live within 35 miles of that facility … and can see the top of that tower, you can get high-speed access from us," says Jim Hannan, vice president of networking technology for Sprint’s Broadband Wireless Group. Each super cell serves about 30,000 customers; Hannan says cells might serve up to "a million homes," but Sprint so far has only opened use on about a third of it’s channels.
Sprint and WorldCom are both exploring cellularization options, allowing them to break and reuse frequency throughout the same market.
Standards Wars
MMDS is an industry not known for allegiance to standards — indeed there are a number of wildly varied proprietary designs on the equipment market. Yet most manufacturers have broadly arranged themselves in two distinct camps — those supporting the existing DOCSIS standard, and those which oppose it.
DOCSIS supporters tend to be those manufacturers active in the early days of MMDS, when the focus was primarily on television transmission. Many of these companies have paired themselves with cable modem suppliers — notably Sprint’s favored supplier Hybrid and Vyyo. The pro-DOCSIS camp points to the headaches LMDS manufacturers have experienced and suggests that coasting behind the cable industry saves both time and money.
DOCSIS opponents claim the Cable Labs standard doesn’t make efficient use of the air link. These newer participants, including companies like Wi-LAN and Cisco, favor an approach using OFDM (orthagonal frequency division multiplexing). Proponents say that OFDM offers immunity from multipath distortion and fudges line-of-sight requirements.
DOCSIS or OFDM, most MMDS systems on the marketplace utilize IP cores, with OFDM critic Adaptive Broadband plumping for an ATM-based approach.
"We’re reserving two thirds of our channels to allow us to transition to a cellular architecture," says Hannan. He predicts a full cellular MMDS network by the end of next year, when the company switches to second generation services.
Services are, for now, line-of-sight.
"That can be alleviated by some technologies we are testing, like OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)," asserts Michael Barnes, director for product management and development at WorldCom.
Project mighty mouse
Getting in the game was a no-brainer.
"It makes us independent of the RBOCS," says Russ Robinson, Sprint’s director of communications for the company’s National Consumer Organization. "When you go into these local markets the challenge of course is always the local loops and the COs." Sprint began looking into fixed wireless around five years ago, when an in-house strategy group opened Project Mighty Mouse (so named for the two M’s in MMDS). Mighty Mouse was intended find ways to avoid working with incumbent carriers for service delivery, eliminating the "accidental" provisioning issues and service outages some say RBOCs frequently use to damage smaller competitors.
Wireless cable companies using MMDS invariably began to fail, unable to compete with the vastly funded direct broadcast satellite competition. A number of these operators started tinkering with two-way broadcast to investigate data transport, under special licenses from the FCC. Mighty Mouse closely tracked these companies, specifically two of the most aggressive experimenters — People’s Choice TV and American Telecasting. As soon as they proved two-way MMDS data transmission was workable, Sprint swooped in and bought the companies.
"Sprint really believes that to be competitive you have to be facilities based, " says Hannan. "You have to own your facilities in the local market.
"Our network consists of a tower and a CPE in the home," explains Hannan, who calls himself a converted cable guy. Telephone or CATV networks, on the other hand, "have a tower or satellite or whatever, and miles of fiber optic, and then they have miles of coaxial cable with amplifiers and reverse amplifiers and bridges and taps and stuff like that.
"All the stuff they have, we have air. That’s our network — air."
Competitor WorldCom began snapping up flailing MMDS video broadcasters two years ago, including CAI Wireless, Wireless One, CS Wireless and Prime One/TeleTV.
"Obviously, video is not our end gain in this," points out Barnes.
Instead, the two companies were doing an end-run around the prohibitive spectrum auctioning process. Sprint grabbed seven MMDS operators for $1.2 billion, including the first two-way MMDS provider, SpeedChoice, which currently serves as the foundation for the company’s growing Phoenix network.
"We paid $1 billion to get 30 million homes," grins Robinson. "AT&T paid $100 billion."
"Two-way data," says Barnes, "is the real gem, and that’s why, frankly, WorldCom, Sprint and others got interested in this market. We realized there was a gold mine in that spectrum. And unlike other wireline alternatives, [it doesn’t] involve lots of handoffs and coordination with third parties."
Cohesive airspace
MMDS networks are "extremely reliable," says Hannan. "When you look at the architecture it sort of makes sense. The technology we’re using is 30 years old."
Network reliability in the event of power outages comes via batteries for several minutes, "and then a diesel generator kicks off," says Hannan. So far Sprint hasn’t suffered a moment’s loss of service. Hannan says the company built out their fixed wireless network with a "carrier class mentality. We’re clearly getting very, very many nines of performances," although he declines to give a specific number.
MMDS is too high frequency to allow building penetration far beyond the base station, and line-of-site issues even extend to heavy foliage further from the transmitter. Most receivers sit outside the building as many windows in modern office spaces have metallic tinting that effectively blocks transmission.
However, line-of-sight marks the only real reliability issue, both companies agree. MMDS’ frequency is low enough for all-weather conditions, unlike LMDS — which may suffer from rain fade — and laser, which can have problems in fog-bound environments. And unlike DSL, there’s no degradation of signal the further you get from the CO (or in this case, the tower).
There’s no instability in the service, says Hannan. "It either works or it doesn’t." That extends to interference issues as well.
"It’s not shared spectrum," says Barnes. "The beauty of owning the spectrum is [that it] really minimizes interference issues." Indeed the nature of MMDS spectrum allocation, and the providers’ patchwork method of acquiring it, means that most regions have a single operator and cohesive airspace.
The paucity of service providers and active networks hasn’t deterred manufacturers from embracing MMDS.
Which isn’t to rule out interference from rival operators as a potential problem. Sprint operates alone in Phoenix, but that’s not to say someone else might not set up shop in the next town over. All it takes is two rival towers 70 miles apart and service issues begin to arise.
"We do have adjacent systems," says Sprint’s Hannan. "We have to coordinate the use of frequencies between markets." In July Sprint, WorldCom and independent competitor Nucentrix got together and hashed out the Breckenridge Agreement, a treatise to work together to avoid interference in adjoining markets and maximize frequency use. With the agreement under their belt, the players were ready to ramp up their trial efforts and steam ahead to full commercial deployment.
Small to mid-size focus
Both Sprint and WorldCom target small- and medium-sized businesses, saying that MMDS isn’t really suited to large business customers. Sprint offers service to consumers in all of its markets as well; WorldCom has a consumer trial in Jackson, Miss. focussing on MDU (multi-dwelling unit) environments. The $39.95 per month service includes a wireless LAN component demonstrating one advantage MMDS has over the wired competition. Users can move freely within the apartment complex, even access the Internet poolside through their laptops.
Sprint offers similar consumer pricing — $39.95 in Phoenix and $44.95 in Houston, for example.
"It gets you your hookup, six email accounts, Web pages," says Robinson. "Earthlink service is what it is, because we have an agreement with Earthlink." Sprint’s business product offers multiple computer hookups and even multiple IP addresses. Business prices range from $149.95 monthly in Phoenix to about $200 in Houston. "The difference is system usage," Robinson explains. "If you’re using more of the resource we charge you more."
Both companies offer installation between five and 10 days, another selling point over competitors such as DSL, which are renowned for provisioning difficulties and hellish delivery times. Receiver installation takes a single truck roll and about three hours. Once connected, users can expect average speeds of around 1.2 Mbps downstream.
"MMDS service can provide burst speeds up to 10 Mbps," explains Barnes. "But we believe the sweet spot for MMDS is DSL-like speeds, which are T1 and below. There’s a huge demand for service at those speeds, and it’s a great way to optimize bandwidth."
"Our goal," agrees Hannan, "is that customers in a fully loaded network in the busy hours get nothing less than 512 kbps minimum." During off-peak hours or in sparsely populated markets, he says, customers routinely get up to 3 Mbps.
Frequency swap
Despite it’s similar always-on nature, MMDS offers greater security than DSL and cable modems, says Hannan, in part because Sprint and WorldCom are the only people legally allowed to use specific frequencies in their markets. "You can’t buy this equipment at Radio Shack," Hannan laughs. "You can’t listen to all of the traffic that’s on the air because [we use a] bridged technology, rather than a routed technology." Sprint channel hops between transmissions, frequently swapping frequencies to further frustrate would-be snoops.
Intercepting signals, he notes, would be "difficult for anyone but NASA."
Neither Sprint nor WorldCom would discuss how many customers are currently using their fixed wireless solutions. "We’re not really making money yet," says a characteristically straightforward Robinson. "We’re steering away from [giving actual numbers] until we get a good feel. We’re up in the thousands. The financial guys don’t really like us [giving numbers].
"[But] we’ve got five markets now, and probably five to seven coming up" in the next two months. He says Sprint should have 30 to 40 next year.
In addition to this month’s launch in Memphis, WorldCom has filed for licenses in 16 markets. It hopes to have 20 or 30 regional networks by the end of 2001.
"We cover 40% of households," says WorldCom’s Barnes. "Approximately 50% of the population." WorldCom, he says, has more spectrum licenses than anybody, with a wireless footprint bigger "than anyone else in the industry."
Consumer reaction, says Robinson, has been tremendous. "We haven’t marketed it; the PR has done it for us." He says Sprint has only to announce service in an area and — boom — "we’ll generate as much business as [we] can handle for several months." In the Tucson market Sprint provisioned one customer who happened to be an online columnist and member of a Mac user group. "Now we’ve got Mac users coming from everywhere," smiles Robinson. People, he says, are eager for the service "once word of mouth gets around."
Sprint has found it easy to educate consumers about wireless access. "We often tell them to think about direct broadcast satellite TV," says Robinson. "They get it."
The paucity of service providers and active networks at the moment hasn’t deterred equipment manufacturers from embracing MMDS. Many vendors, including Cisco and Wi-LAN, see numbers like Barnes’ "50% of the population" and start scrambling to redesign UNII band equipment or develop new products.
Says Barnes, "The industry right now is very new. There are a lot of infrastructure equipment providers out there that are coming up with some very compelling products that we’re evaluating." WorldCom is currently trialing a number of different products in Boston and Dallas.
Trial service
Coming up in the immediate future are MMDS VPNs — Sprint advertises the service on their Web site, although currently the feature is only in trials. WorldCom also markets its service as a disaster recovery tool, according to Barnes, "because it provides complete medium diversity. We’re selling it as a primary service, but we believe you’ll be able to use it in a variety of means."
WorldCom claims to have launched with second generation technology enabling SLA and QoS metrics, while Sprint says it’ll be using 2G systems by the third or fourth quarter next year, including the launch of toll quality voice over MMDS. It’s currently working with vendors to develop near- and non-line-of-site technologies.
Of course, such plans rely on commercial MMDS deployments having a future. It appears that microwave’s current resurgence may be a brief one. Last month President Clinton ordered government agencies to work with the FCC and the private sector to source spectrum for future 3G auctions — possibly at the expense of existing networks. In fact the government has singled out Sprint and WorldCom — along with the Defense Department, ironically — for pending spectrum reallocation, potentially grounding the fledgling MMDS access industry before it takes off.
Sprint isn’t worried. "In order to move us out of the spectrum we are using for MMDS," says company spokesman James Fisher, "they would have to locate fully comparable spectrum that would give us the same capabilities ... as what we have now. We do not think that that spectrum is available." |
