Carriers' plans are up in the airwaves
dailynews.yahoo.com
Monday July 24 03:33 PM EDT
By John Rendleman and Carmen Nobel, eWEEK
Fixed wireless technology can extend the reach of voice and video services to remote locations
Although they continue to struggle with technical and strategic hurdles, carriers are picking up the pace of fixed wireless data services for businesses interested in linking to the Internet via the airwaves.
AT&T Wireless Services Inc., based here, announced last week plans to launch fixed wireless services in four U.S. cities by December. The rollout of services to Anchorage, Alaska; Houston; Los Angeles; and San Diego extends AT&T's broadband service beyond the Dallas metropolitan area, where about 2,000 customers are testing it.
AT&T's plans follow the introduction last month by Sprint Corp. (NYSE:FON - news) of its MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution System) Broadband Direct fixed wireless data service in Tucson, Ariz., offering base transmission speeds of 256K bps to about 85 percent of the city, said officials at Sprint's Broadband Wireless Group, in Kansas City, Mo.
The Sprint service, which previously had been offered only in Phoenix, provides downstream "burst" speeds as fast as 5M bps and upstream speeds approaching 1M bps.
Separately, Western Wireless Corp. (Nasdaq:WWCA - news), of Bellevue, Wash., and Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE:NT - news), of Brampton, Ontario, last week announced that their rural fixed wireless trial will begin by year's end in Minnesota and South Dakota.
Fixed wireless, based primarily on some form of MMDS, gives users within 35 miles of a central broadcast tower high-speed Internet, voice and video services with just a small parabolic antenna, a low-end transmitter and a beefed-up cable modem. The technology can bring broadband service to rural areas, cities and other places without cable or sufficient copper wiring. The cost of fixed wireless—Sprint and AT&T charge $50 to $90 per month for the service—is comparable to cable modem or digital subscriber line access.
The main issue for fixed wireless data services is availability, as they're limited to just a handful of cities.
"I'd like to see more of the service everywhere, for home use as well as business use," said Mark Elzey, director of information management at Salt River Sand & Rock. Sprint's wireless service works flawlessly for the Scottsdale, Ariz., company, though one of Salt River's nearby sites can't use the service for technical reasons and another, more distant site can't use it because the service doesn't reach there, Elzey said.
Carriers are also facing internal issues in rolling out these services. AT&T's fixed wireless business, for example, competes directly with landline broadband services that the carrier is offering through its MediaOne cable television subsidiary. AT&T officials admit the landline broadband initiative has slowed the launch of the wireless unit's offerings.
Currently, AT&T's fixed wireless services are "carefully carved" around those markets and won't initially be available in the Los Angeles neighborhoods where MediaOne operates, said AT&T Wireless President and CEO Michael Keith.
The company hopes to make the service available to 15 million homes in 40 U.S. markets by the end of 2002.
Currently, AT&T's WorldNet is the only ISP (Internet service provider) available with AT&T Wireless' fixed wireless service, although Keith said he is talking to other ISPs about possible partnerships.
"I'm still small enough that they can say, 'We'll wait and see,'" Keith said.
The AT&T service in San Diego will run on the same frequency band as Personal Communications Service, while the other cities will run on the 2.3GHz Wireless Communications Service spectrum band. Sprint's service operates in the 2.5GHz-to-2.7GHz frequency range.
Fixed wireless providers must also deal with sharing the airwaves with competitors in service regions that sometimes overlap.
Earlier this month, WorldCom Inc. (Nasdaq:WCOM - news), of Clinton, Miss.; Sprint; and Nucentrix Broadband Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:NCNX - news), of Plano, Texas, struck an accord, dubbed the Breckenridge Agreement, that settles conflicts over frequency interference among competing providers. |
