Bored by an Angel

Just three years ago, the lid was blown off AT&T's quiet development of a plan to use excess PCS spectrum and a proprietary wireless technology for residential local access. Last week, the company made commercial serviceover the technology available in Fort Worth, Texas, and the industry responded w ith a collective yawn.

The reaction to this service launch certainly doesn't jibe with the hype and attention the strategy garnered when it was first uncovered. It's also an unfairly chilly response to the first fruits of a complex and economically challenging technology initiative - especially one that AT&T never wanted to discuss in the first place. Despite the company's concerted efforts to keep the now-infamous Project Angel under wraps, the plan became public knowledge when the technology was still very immature and the economics of the equipment were nowhere near commercially feasible.

Now it appears AT&T has managed to reduce service costs to a level comparable with other residential data offerings. No word on the cost of the customer premises antenna - which was reportedly the component that was tripping up commercial viability - but because the technology is being deployed, chances are the antenna's price has been reduced to point that it can be tolerated by customers or subsidized by the carrier.

So why the blase response? It's symptomatic of the communications industry's tendency to oversell innovation too early. Technology producers talk the talk so early that by the time they muddle through the development lag, everyone has already moved on to the next new thing. And there are now so many next new things that our patience for any one is limited.

This phenomenon isn't limited to the wireless sector, but it certainly festers there. A technological cousin to AT&T's wireless local loop efforts, high-frequency broadband wireless access, has been much ballyhooed for some time. Recently, however, spectrum license holders and the investment community have started to get antsy about the commercial readiness of the access format - so much so that service providers are purchasing less than optimal equipment just so they can demonstrate some level of progress.

Mobile wireless technology also has fallen victim to this dilemma of disillusionment. Despite the fact that 3G systems weren't slated for deployment until the early part of this decade, people have been criticizing their progress for several years. And I don't even want to raise the specter of the CDMA/TDMA/GSM air interface debate that has dominated wireless discussions for so many years.

Many non-wireless technology formats also have been introduced to fanfare far before it was even possible for them to perform, including DSL, cable modems, optical switching, WDM and even fiber itself. Communications technologies that have promised much in the early stages and delivered lackluster results in the end are almost too numerous to list.

Some technologies will fall flat and disappoint, but many others will bloom if given the opportunity. Given the impressive pricing metrics AT&T achieved in Forth Worth, it wouldn't be too surprising if fixed wireless ends up taking a prominent place next to cable in the carrier's residential broadband quiver.

Even so, AT&T had better start working on its encore.