Motorola's Wireless Broadband Strategy
By Alex Goldman
A team of executives from Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola visited
the ISP-Planet offices to explain Motorola's MOTOwi4 plan for
wireless broadband services.
The team included Jim Welch, former CEO and president of Wireless
Valley, an RF mapping company acquired by Motorola in 2004 (Welch is
now vice president in charge of the company's wireless broadband
product portfolio strategy); and Phil Bolt, CEO of Asburton, UK-
based backhaul radio maker Orthogon Systems, acquired by Motorola
earlier this year (Bolt is now Motorola's general manager of
wireless backhaul solutions and is still based in Ashburton, one of
the nicest towns in England, and says he's added office space to
accommodate growth).
Two executives from Motorola's own PR group completed the team: Dava
Curtin, Motorola director of marketing; and Kathi Haas, Motorola
senior PR manager for networks.
"So you're here to explain how Orthogon and Canopy will work
together," we asked.
MOTOwi4
Actually, Welch explained, the company's wireless broadband strategy
is bigger than that. In addition to Canopy for last mile and
Orthogon for backhaul, the MOTOwi4 strategy incorporates mesh
networking technology from Mesh Networks, company acquired by
Motorola two years ago. WiMAX and broadband over power line (BPL)
technologies play important roles too. In the future, the company
could incorporate its recent Symbol buy, but we explained that RFID
is not currently an issue for ISPs.
The company sees WiMAX and the rest of its portfolio of wireless
broadband solutions as useful for urban and dense deployments in
both developed and emerging markets. BPL is useful for in-building
deployments, such as hotels and apartment buildings (as in this
recent but otherwise unrelated announcement from power company
subsidiary First Communications).
Welch said that the mesh networking technology from Mesh Networks
was designed for first responders and the military. It's robust and
scalable, and maintain connectivity at even when vehicles are
traveling at 50 mph. The company says it has extended is mesh
portfolio to include 802.11 support over multiple frequencies.
Bolt said that Orthogon, Motorola's backhaul solutions division, is
now working on radios for recently available spectrum, such as 5.4
GHz. Europe and the U.S. have published rules for avoiding
interfering with military radar, he said, and the backhaul solutions
division can develop algorithms based on the rules. Whereas at
present, radios can operate at only 100 mW EIRP, they can run up to
1 W EIRP if they avoid interfering with radar, making new
applications possible.
Bolt and Welch said that municipalities are starting to realize that
they can deploy two networks at once: a best effort network for free
for residents, and a high availability network for government and
first responders. Bolt pointed out that RF planning and deploying
radios can be as expensive as buying the radios, so if you want two
networks, it's cheaper to deploy both at the same time.
We asked whether there was any channel conflict between the IP
strategy of the broadband wireless division and Motorola's well-
known cellular customers. "There's room for both," Welch
said. "WiMAX is 4G."
Haas added that WiMAX and 3G are complementary technologies and the
entire MOTOwi4 portfolio has solutions that can meet a variety of
needs from service providers to enterprise.
Welch said that government agencies are also adopting wireless
broadband, especially in the 4.9 GHz band reserved for first
responders. We had heard on our ISP-Wireless list that equipment for
this band is relatively expensive because it lacks the volume demand
of 2.4 GHz and UNII equipment. Bolt said that this is true to some
extent, but that the 4.9 GHz equipment tends to be more specialized,
built to stricter standards, so the two cannot be fairly compared.
Bolt said that being part of Motorola has given him access to
customers who never talked to Orthogon but communicate regularly
with Motorola. He cited several examples. The radios are performing
edge trunking tasks for cellular networks. They are deployed in 6
GHz utility networks where they provide a 5.8 GHz backup to aging
equipment and allow the utilities to perform maintenance, repairs,
and upgrades without downtime.
Perhaps the most exotic deployment is on a buoy over Aquarius, the
only undersea laboratory run by the U.S. government's National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a deployment that
Motorola touts in detail in a case study [.pdf].
The case study reports:
The broadband wireless link has maintained carrier-grade (99.999
percent) availability through rough 6 foot (2 meter) swells as well
as Hurricane Jeanne off the Florida coast. During the hurricane, the
PTP 400 Series link not only maintained the connection without
dropping a packet, but its durable antennas remained intact as well.
Bolt says that the backhaul equipment, with its interference
mitigation technology (for more on the technology, see our article,
Building Big, Invisible Bridges), is able to sustain links over
water and prairie land where RF, even with LOS, is subject to
interference from ground reflections. "Our goal is to be a layer 2
link that you can deploy and forget," he says.
MOTOwi4 is a big portfolio of wireless broadband solutions for a big
company. Its technologies will be deployed to connect people and
things on railroads and utilities, schools and hospitals, and
throughout major cities. It will support humanitarian efforts and it
will be deployed in areas that have never had a copper-based
telephone infrastructure. It's a global strategy. |
