Barrett Xplore plans ambitious Canadian 4G network

Barrett Xplore, a Canadian wireless broadband service provider, announced ambitious plans today for a 4G network to serve rural areas throughout Canada by 2012. The network will use equipment Alvarion to deliver nomadic WiMax service throughout a large part of the country, which initially will focus on providing high-speed data services, with VOIP and other services being added at a later date. In the most remote areas, Barrett Xplore will rely on what the company’s Chief Strategy Officer Allison Lenehan called “4G satellite” service.

The satellite service will be delivered through partnerships with Hughes Networks and WildBlue Communications, Lenehan told Connected Planet. Both companies, within the next two years, plan to launch satellites capable of providing 4G-equivalent bandwidth to support service in the U.S. Barrett Xplore will use the same satellites to provide service in Canada.

For the last five to six years, Barrett Xplore has focused on delivering wireless broadband service to rural areas of Canada using unlicensed spectrum and pre-standard WiMax equipment. “We already have several hundred towers,” Lenehan said. “We will roll out some new ones and overlay service on existing towers. By 2012 we’ll have most of the 1200 towers completed with our 4G upgrade.”

The Technology

The 4G service will use licensed spectrum, which Barrett Xplore has been quietly acquiring, primarily in the 3.5 GHz band. In the future, according to Lenehan, the network equipment used should be able to easily support upgrades to either WiMax 802.16m or LTE.

The 802.16m standard will be the basis for WiMax 2 efforts under development by the IEEE, Alvarion Vice President of Marketing Ashish Sharma told Connected Planet. The goal of that standard is to boost bandwidth speeds to 100 Mb/s or more.

"The version of LTE that the Alvarion product will support is TD-LTE, a time domain duplexed version of the standard that is well suited for broadband wireless," Sharma said. “You’re able to use less spectrum with more efficiency, and usually the spectrum has been less expensive than FDD spectrum.”

Little Public Funding

Like the U.S., Canada has a broadband stimulus program, and Barrett Xplore won some money through that program. But that is the only public funding the new network will require, says Lenehan.

“We come at this market differently than how the incumbents view it,” Lenehan said. “They’ve advocated DSL or cable but those are not necessarily the right technology paths for lower-density solutions. Wireless continues to be the right roadmap for lower-density markets.”

Lenehan noted that satellite service will have some latency, but he said Barrett Xplore has tested satellite-based voice and data services and most customers have been satisfied with the quality. He noted that many rural customers already experience some latency with landline voice because the underlying networks often rely on microwave backhaul and repeaters.