I do find it curious that the only company making "negative" comments on HDR is Nortel.
I don't know if these comments are about HDR, but they're not exactly positive. In particular: "U S West experimented with a wireless-data
system developed by Qualcomm Inc. earlier this
year, using two of its cellular-system sites in
Minneapolis to deliver fixed Internet access at
about 1.5 mbps over an unused segment of its
personal-communications-services spectrum.
"You can take our plans for the Denver trial with
Adaptive as a sign that the Qualcomm solution
didn't pan out," the U S West source said.
Then again, this comment is about fixed wireless only.
Message 11838762
To: DUCT TAPE HAIR CLUB who wrote (31)
From: DUCT TAPE HAIR CLUB Sunday, November 7, 1999 8:28 PM EST
Reply # of 33
from broadband week.
Broadband Week for November 8, 1999
U S West Looks to
Broadband Wireless
By FRED DAWSON November 8, 1999
U S West and start-up competitive local-exchange
carrier Fuzion Wireless Communications Inc. have
opened still another path into wireless-broadband
communications by exploiting new technology that
operates over the unlicensed frequency band at 5.8
gigahertz.
Both companies are deploying a system supplied
by Phoenix-based Adaptive Broadband Corp. with
very different agendas in mind. U S West is looking
at the technology as a possible market-coverage
backup to its digital-subscriber-line service, while
Fuzion has already launched an all-wireless
business service in southern Florida, which it
intends to extend across the country and into other
countries, as well.
Publicly, U S West would only acknowledge that it
is looking at the AB technology "to better
understand the characteristics of
broadband-wireless technologies" and "to help us
understand the value customers may place on
high-speed wireless data."
But sources said the carrier -- with a trial slated to
get under way soon in the Denver area -- has high
hopes for this wireless system on the basis of its
previous experiences with various wireless options.
"We need a way to reach all of the people we can't
reach with DSL, and this may be the way to go,"
said a U S West official, speaking on background.
The AB system U S West is deploying operates
over a 200-megahertz segment of what is known as
"U-NII" (Unlicensed National Information
Infrastructure) spectrum at the 5.8-GHz tier to
deliver multiple data channels at 25 megabits per
second each on a shared-use basis.
The system also operates at the
multichannel-multipoint-distribution-service
frequency and other broadband tiers, AB vice
president of customer marketing Jeff Kolluch said.
U S West experimented with a wireless-data
system developed by Qualcomm Inc. earlier this
year, using two of its cellular-system sites in
Minneapolis to deliver fixed Internet access at
about 1.5 mbps over an unused segment of its
personal-communications-services spectrum.
"You can take our plans for the Denver trial with
Adaptive as a sign that the Qualcomm solution
didn't pan out," the U S West source said.
The move to the U-NII tier represents an
opportunity to offer a more flexible, higher-speed
service over wireless than the carrier could offer in
a limited portion of PCS spectrum, the source said.
And because the spectrum is unlicensed, it's
available immediately at no cost to whomever
makes use of it first in any given service area.
"We've already had experience working with
unlicensed spectrum, so we are comfortable with
this option," the official noted.
Fuzion -- a venture-capital-backed company begun
by a team that includes experts who helped to
spearhead Siemens AG's fixed-wireless
broadband-product initiative -- plans to build a
nationwide business on the U-NII spectrum by
quickly putting the application to use in targeted
markets ahead of potential competitors.
"We're a CLEC offering all types of
broadband-wireless data, including Internet access
and private Intranets," Fuzion vice president of
marketing and business development John Wind
said. "We're in the process of partnering with ASPs
[applications-service providers] so that by January,
we'll have providers offering specialized applications
such as e-commerce and VPNs [virtual private
networks]."
Fuzion is building an
asynchronous-transfer-mode-based infrastructure
using backbone facilities supplied by Qwest
Communications International Inc., with provisions
in place for supplying connectivity to local markets
around the country, Wind said. Fuzion is
employing DS3-links to tie its wireless hubs into
the backbone, he noted.
The flexibility of the AB system allows Fuzion to
offer guaranteed symmetrical access rates at any
speed up to 25 mbps, starting at 500 kilobits per
second in each direction and moving to 1 mbps
and beyond in 1-mbps increments, Wind said.
The technology also allows the company to offer
"burst" services, allowing a customer to get
regularly scheduled increases in bandwidth to
accommodate periods of high-volume file transfers,
he added.
"Bandwidth on-demand really shines as an
advantage we have over traditional wireline
systems," Wind said. "This is something the
market wants."
The AB system employs a "packet-on-demand"
media-access-control mechanism that assigns
precisely the bandwidth needed by a particular
end-user only when that user is online, Kolluch
said.
"We also use time-division duplexing to maximize
bandwidth efficiency," he added. TDD employs
time slots for sending messages in either direction
over a given spectrum segment, thereby eliminating
the need for separate upstream and downstream
channels and a guard band in between.
The system is able to assign bandwidth
dynamically as needed and only when a user goes
online through the use of dedicated "request" time
slots assigned to each user.
These dedicated request links occupy only a very
small portion of available bandwidth, but they carry
enough information to ensure that as soon as the
user goes on, the system will provide the bit rate
required for the application, Kolluch said.
Fuzion's "bread-and-butter" service so far is the
2-mbps connection, which it offers for $1,495 per
month, including a voice-over-IP (Internet protocol)
local-loop solution that will be implemented after
the first of the year, Wind said. This is about what
it costs users to obtain local-loop and shared T-1
service from BellSouth Corp., where the average
access rate works out to be about 384 kbps, Wind
noted.
Fuzion has also arranged for satellite capacity to
link networks that it plans to build in parts of Latin
America, Africa and Europe back to Qwest's U.S.
backbone. He said preparations for use of wireless
spectrum in those regions are under way, but he
declined to discuss details.
Stateside, Fuzion hopes to establish "squatter's
rights" for use of the U-NII spectrum on as broad a
basis as possible, Wind said. "We're the first ones
anywhere to deploy this [AB] technology, but a lot
of others are looking at it, including BellSouth," he
added. |
