Re: Fixed Broadband Wireless- General Reading
"With all the talk of the broadband wars focused on the battle between cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) services, the technology known as fixed wireless is easy to miss."
Thread- I'm one who kind of/sort of missed this access technology. But I've spent the last six months or so, catching up. -MikeM(From Florida)
*********************
Get Ready For Fixed Wireless Access
By John Shinal
April 18, 2000- With all the talk of the broadband wars focused on the battle between cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) services, the technology known as fixed wireless is easy to miss. But that hasn't stopped a number of large communications-equipment makers and a handful of startups from investing in it as an alternative Internet access offering.
Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, and Motorola are all developing wireless broadband products. Meanwhile, AT&T, MCI WorldCom, BellSouth, and others are buying licenses for part of the wireless spectrum that can be used to deploy some variation of fixed wireless Internet access.
The market for fixed wireless services is expected to reach about $1 billion by the end of 2002, according to market researcher Gartner Group. That's a paltry sum compared to the tens of billions expected to be spent on cable and DSL services during the same time. ``It's a slow starter,' says Gartner Group analyst Bob Egan, because fixed wireless technology is relatively new.
Yet in geographic areas where there is no cable or telephone infrastructure, such as undeveloped countries and some rural parts of the United States, a fixed wireless network can be built much faster and cheaper than a wireline system.
Building a wireline network from scratch powerful enough to send voice and data at broadband speeds (more than one megabit per second) requires buying rights of way, digging trenches and laying hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable. A fixed wireless network, on the other hand, requires only a transmission device on one end, a receiver and signal converter on the other and the airwaves to link them.
For a service provider such as MCI WorldCom, which lacks the cable network of AT&T or the local phone wires of the Baby Bells, fixed wireless gives the provider a way to crack the broadband access market. Spike Technologies, a Nashua, N.H.-based startup, has in fact designed and built what it calls a low-frequency wireless concentrator with companies like MCI WorldCom in mind, says Spike Chief Executive James Zucco.
"They don't have the copper or the coax [cable]," says Zucco, the former CEO of Shiva, an Internet access device company that's now part of Intel. "They want to be able to deploy [a broadband network] in months, not years."
Spike Technologies' equipment transmits data at low frequencies to multiple locations simultaneously. Low-frequency transmissions are less affected by rain and trees than high-frequency ones, yet there's less spectrum available for commercial use, Zucco says. Netro(NTRO) is also building such point-to-multipoint wireless gear, but for higher frequencies. The San Jose, Calif.-based company has signed original equipment manufacturer agreements with Lucent and Motorola.
Another market for fixed wireless, which may ultimately prove more lucrative than rural buildouts, is for extending cable and DSL service within apartment buildings or office complexes. A wireless base station connected to a DSL or cable access device can beam Internet data and voice calls throughout such locations.
``A large apartment building could offer broadband access as an amenity,' with such a configuration less expensively than by running cable or DSL to every unit, says Gartner Group's Egan. Service providers such as Winstar are already attacking this market, he says.
[This is not of the same subject?] In a similar vein, AT&T plans to offer fixed wireless as a way for cable-Internet subscribers to create wireless home networks. Using an ``enhanced personal base station,' AT&T customers will be able to share multiple voice and data lines over a single cable connection. The service will be available to 1.5 million households in three major U.S. markets by the end of the year, says Dave Gibbons, the head of AT&T's fixed wireless unit. He declined to identify which cities will get the service first.
While fixed wireless may ultimately find a sizable niche among Internet access technologies, the cost and immaturity of the technology will keep it from competing with cable and DSL in the mass market anytime soon. The base station equipment needed for adequate bandwidth now costs up to $1,200, and ``until that comes down, the customer acquisition costs are too high' for widespread deployment, Egan says.
Also, new fixed wireless product lines being developed by Cisco, Nortel and others are "early stage" and can't provide the level of reliability of cable or DSL hookups, according to Egan. "The tools for delivering that service are still a little shaky," he says. As the equipment is refined and costs come down, the case for service providers using fixed wireless will be more compelling. |
