Re: LMDS Vendors- MOT/CSCO/NTRO, NT and LMDS SPs-NXLK, TGNT
"NextLink has offered PMP services on a limited basis in Los Angeles and Dallas using gear supplied by SpectraPoint Waveless, a joint venture between Motorola Inc. Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. with Motorola as the majority owner. But NextLink has been unable to move ahead with PMP LMDS deployments because of problems with reliability among all the vendor systems the operator has been testing."
Crusader- Interesting follow up comment(from the article below) to your post about MOT gathering up parts of other equipment companies to supply fixed wireless solutions. I've been noticing quite a few xMDS stories lately. Could become interesting this year. ie, strong revenue growth for the equipment players. -MikeM(From Florida)
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NextLink Eyes LMDS Rollout Using Nortel Networks Gear
By FRED DAWSON
March 27, 2000- NextLink Communications Inc. is finally comfortable with wireless broadband as a platform for mission-critical services, signaling that the long-awaited surge in domestic deployments of LMDS and other spectrum categories is at hand.
NextLink, the largest holder of local-multipoint-distribution service spectrum, has chosen Nortel Networks to supply its first wave of rollouts across the country, targeting 25 markets by year's end.
Point-to-multipoint service deployments will start with Nortel's FDMA (frequency-division multiple-access) system in the next few months and move later in the year toward more advanced TDMA (time-division multiple-access) capabilities over the same installed base of transmitters, officials said.
"Nortel had the most stable point-to-multipoint (PMP) equipment, along with the highest level of functionality and best cost parameters in a stable system at the present time, which are the primary things we're looking for," said Doug Carter, CTO at NextLink. "There are other vendor options with very appealing architectures and better cost points that we're looking at, with the expectation that we'll choose a second PMP vendor and another point-to-point supplier before the year is out."
NextLink has offered PMP services on a limited basis in Los Angeles and Dallas using gear supplied by SpectraPoint Waveless, a joint venture between Motorola Inc. Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. with Motorola as the majority owner. But NextLink has been unable to move ahead with PMP LMDS deployments because of problems with reliability among all the vendor systems the operator has been testing.
"We've had a real problem with basic reliability, things like signals fading or dropping out for three to five seconds, including with the Nortel equipment until they passed the latest burn-in test," Carter said.
NextLink, which started as a wireline CLEC focusing on the delivery of high-volume voice links to businesses over fiber rings in major metro areas, is now positioning itself to be a big player in commercial data services, Carter noted.
FDMA systems offer a robust means of delivering separate channel streams of voice and data. But the future belongs to TDMA systems that can support dynamic allocations of bandwidth and the mixing of data and traditional digital-voice signals within a single channel to serve multiple end users in a targeted building, he said.
"Now we're pushing ahead with true broadband services, and LMDS is becoming more of a linchpin to our service strategy," Carter noted. "Data is going to be a big piece of our business going into the second half, once we close the deal with Concentric [Networks]."
That deal, which involves the acquisition of a leading nationwide ISP, will give NextLink service provisioning and management skills that go beyond pure transport to all varieties of hosted applications and support for business-to-business, as well as the electronic-commerce services that are the hot buttons in today's commercial marketplace.
In NextLink's strategy, PMP LMDS is ideally suited for customers looking for broadband services in the 10 megabit-per-second range. The firm is using DSL, or digital-subscriber line, as its primary mode for serving customers at 2 mbps or lower speeds and point-to-point LMDS for high-end customers looking for connectivity at the 100-mbps level, Carter said.
Nortel, like other wireless-broadband vendors, points to initial rollouts of TDMA systems in other countries as proof that the technology has become "hardened" for commercial deployment.
"We're selling a lot of TDMA systems, including one in Portugal and one in Argentina which we can talk about publicly and many more that are to be announced," said John Skoro, marketing director for broadband wireless access at Nortel.
"We moved the bar ahead by creating a system that allows carriers to deploy either FDMA or TDMA on the same radio using different carriers for each," Skoro said. The TDMA bandwidth-management and media-access-control functions are based on cable's Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, which is becoming increasingly popular as a core element of advanced wireless-broadband systems.
The two companies said they plan to extend their relationship in an initiative designed to expand the use of wireless broadband in a wide area Internet Protocol end-to-end network between several major metropolitan regions. This will help NextLink create a virtual Ethernet network that can be centrally managed across a vast base of potential customers, officials noted.
NextLink, founded by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw and various partners, currently offers services in 49 markets and holds LMDS licenses that cover 95 percent of the population in the top 30 U.S. markets.
The company is also acquiring exclusive rights to fiber links in building an IP-centric backbone that will connect over 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2001, with various segments coming on line over the next two years, officials said.
Teligent Inc., one of NextLink's major competitors among wireless-broadband providers, is also about to break out of what has been a limited use of PMP technology in several markets to a nationwide rollout, using licenses at the 24 GHz spectrum tier.
The company hopes to begin that phase in the second quarter, said Steve White, vice president of sales for the company's operations in Texas and Louisianna.
"Right now, that's the plan, but we won't know for sure until things get rolling," White said. "There's still a lot of testing going on in the vendor selection process."
With only 4 percent of 760,000 office buildings nationwide now connected to fiber, the opportunity to deliver broadband access via wireless networks remains huge, White said. "We see revenues from fixed wireless services going from $.3 billion in '99 to over $5 billion in 2003," he noted.
After years of intensive efforts to overcome the barriers to delivering mission-critical services over cost-effective PMP networks in the high-frequency zones used by NextLink, Teligent and other providers, vendors have high expectations that their moment for a payoff has arrived.
"Prior to this generation of broadband-wireless access technology, the industry didn't have the technology platform it needed to deliver voice as well as data, which is what the market wants," said Cynthia Hillery, vice president of marketing at Netro Corp., a San Jose-based supplier of PMP access equipment. "Now we've stepped beyond those limitations and are seeing preparations for service launches underway worldwide, including in the U.S."
Netro, with eight commercial pilot launches and more than 30 trials of PMP systems in play outside the U.S., uses a combination of TDMA multiplexing of signals into asynchronous transfer mode cells and a proprietary media-access control layer system for dynamic allocation of bandwidth, Hillery said.
"TDMA is a hardened technology that is winning market confidence worldwide," she said, adding, "The year 2000 is the year of broadband-wireless access." |
