AT&T's Angel Spreads Wings
By FRED DAWSON October 25,
1999
AT&T Corp. is preparing a massive
rollout
of its "Project Angel" wireless
technology next year, joining what
promises
to be a wide-scale over-the-air
assault against the entrenched forces
in local
broadband communications. "We
always said we would be ready for
commercial deployment [of Project
Angel
technology] by sometime in 2000,
and that is
still the case," AT&T Wireless
Services spokesman Kenneth Woo
said.
Reports from the field indicated that
AT&T has begun contracting for
new
transmitter sites and engineering
services
as it continues to refine its marketing
plans
via a trial under way in Dallas-Fort
Worth, Texas, since early June. "It's
too
soon to say how [the trial] results
will
affect our strategy, but we're
prepared to
move ahead," Woo said.
Meanwhile,
MCI WorldCom Inc., Sprint
Communications Co., U
S West and several smaller
firms also plan to launch new
wireless services
distinct from traditional mobile
services and new high-frequency
broadband services
targeted to businesses at the
LMDS (local multipoint distribution
service) and
other spectrum tiers. Operating
at lower-frequency tiers, these new
services will be
able to penetrate foliage and,
in some cases, walls to deliver
interactive voice and
data services to homes and
businesses. For example, MCI plans
to use newly
acquired MMDS (multichannel
multipoint distribution service)
licenses to deliver
two-way data and
telecommunications services. MCI
also cut a deal
with Metricom Inc., of which
it owns 37 percent, to resell
Metricom's new
128-kilobit-per-second portable data
service over a portion of unlicensed
spectrum at the
900-megahertz tier. U S
West and wireless-broadband
supplier Adaptive
Broadband Corp. are preparing a
Denver-area trial that sources said is
aimed at
determining whether unlicensed
spectrum at the 5-gigahertz level can
be used to
provide high-speed-data services
outside of digital-subscriber-line
areas. As usual,
AT&T refused to discuss
technical details of the proprietary
system
that it intends to use to provide
multiple-line voice and
high-speed-data
services over fixed-wireless links
using
existing cellular and PCS
(personal-communications services)
spectrum
allocations. But sources contracting
or
bidding on contracts for various
aspects of
the project said AT&T believes it
has
cost-effectively turned the little
piece of
spectrum it has left over from the
mobile
applications into a pipe wide enough
to
deliver a four-line voice and
high-speed-data service. "AT&T is
definitely
proceeding with site acquisition and
field
preparations," said Chuck Sackley,
senior vice president for sales and
marketing
at Wireless Facilities Inc., which
supplies engineering and
construction
services to wireless operators.
"They've
already selected some contractors,
and we're talking
with them in hopes of being
chosen, as well," he added. One of
the selected
contractors is American Tower
Corp., which has also been chosen to
supply
transmitter towers for the project.
"We haven't started the work yet,"
American Tower
executive vice president
Steven Moskowitz said, because
"things haven't been
completely consummated."
But Moskowitz confirmed that his
company and
others have turnkey contracts
covering RF engineering, site
construction and other
requirements. "AT&T is
targeting major markets where they
don't
have cable," he said.
Moskowitz also confirmed that, as
previously reported, AT&T plans to
use
spectrum at the 38-GHz tier it
acquired with
Teleport Communications Group for
the Project Angel build-out.
Propagation
limitations at 38 GHz make that
frequency unsuitable for delivering
signals
to end-users in homes, but the
spectrum could be a backbone link
between
central base stations and microcells.
This two-tiered wireless approach
would
allow microcells to be close to
end-users, lowering the number of
people
contending for the limited bandwidth
available from any one microcell.
The
high-frequency link back to
tower-mounted transmitters avoids
using
costly fiber. AT&T officials
declined to
discuss the 38-GHz tier or other
architectural aspects of the plan.
Moskowitz
said
he wasn't sure how the 38-GHz
element
would be used, but he indicated that
it
would be key to residential
offerings.
Metricom -- which has a limited
amount of
spectrum to use -- has a two-tiered
wireless approach
to getting signals close to
end-users, according to senior vice
president of
marketing and sales John
Wernke. Using frequency-hopping
code-division
multiple-access radio
technology, Metricom delivers
saturation coverage
indoors and outdoors to
stationary and mobile users, Wernke
said. The access
link to the modem
antennas is delivered over a thin
slice of unlicensed
spectrum (902 MHz to 928
MHz) via microcell radios on utility
poles. These
radios are interconnected via
wireless links operating at other
frequency tiers to
base stations known as
"Wireline Access Points," which are
linked to data
switches via wireline
backbone networks. Through
complex,
software-based interactions, the
system
determines which microcell radios
within signal reach
would provide the best
service. This allows the system to
handle a fairly high
market penetration, while
maintaining guaranteed data rates,
Wernke said. "The
system sounds
complicated, but we've seen it in
action, and it
works," said Tom DiMatteo,
business-area manager for General
Dynamics
Worldwide Telecommunication
Systems, the wireless engineering
and construction
unit of General Dynamics
Corp. GDWTS helped Metricom
with technical tests
in the San Francisco area
earlier this year. "We weren't
operating over a fully
constructed network, but
there's no reason to believe the
system isn't scalable,"
DiMatteo said. Metricom
has been securing rights of way to
use light poles to
mount shoebox-sized
microcells, and it should have no
trouble meeting its
ambitious construction
schedule, DiMatteo added.
Metricom intends to
operate commercially in New
York; Chicago; Philadelphia;
Washington, D.C.;
Atlanta; Dallas; Houston;
Phoenix; Los Angeles; San Diego;
San Francisco; and
Seattle by mid-2000, with
more than 40 markets targeted for
mid-2001, Wernke
said. MCI is the first to
sign on as a retail provider of the
"Ricochet" service
that Metricom intends to
wholesale, he added. While all areas
of a given metro
region won't be covered in
the initial build-out, the coverage
will be sufficient to
deliver service to targeted
users, including Fortune 1000
employees and mobile
professionals, Wernke said.
"We haven't decided on pricing, but
we expect the
service to be offered at a
small premium over some of the
DSL options," he
added.
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