Joe Brooks, VP of sales and market development for broadband solutions, WorldCom

We're not anywhere close to giving up on fixed wireless. Our first-generation experience has proved to us that there is a marketplace demand for fixed wireless broadband. We think MMDS delivers the product very effectively, very efficiently, very reliably, and makes a good business product for our customers.

Marketplace demand, even using first-generation technology, has shown us that if you are able to supply broadband to the customer base at a reasonable cost as a high-reliability service, a business-class service, then the business market is there. We have not given up on MMDS and don't plan to. MMDS has its place. If you drew a straight line on a piece of paper and said that is the bandwidth continuum and at the bottom end of that continuum is the consumer, the consumer needs the ability to get online, pull down e-mail and e-mail attachments, communicate fast and effectively, and go out and do Web searches. In that environment, you have at least a couple of options for a large percentage of the population today — not everybody — but most consumers have either cable or ADSL.

On the other end of the bandwidth continuum, you have the very large corporation, the corporate headquarters with built-in fiber routes, large manufacturing facilities where they have fiber. You have to look at where fixed wireless fits into that continuum. MMDS spans a larger percentage of that continuum because it gives you a tremendously good geographic footprint. You can cover up to 35 radius miles off a supercell with MMDS, and your speeds do not suffer, depending on your point of presence. If I can see the customer today, if I can get line-of-sight, they can get all of my bandwidth services. With the continued implosion of the data CLEC business and the DSL providers and the slowing of the DSL rollouts from the ILECs, fixed broadband is a magnificent gap-filler that allows the medium-sized business customer to get access where DSL may be unavailable or may no longer be available to them. Fixed wireless broadband, using MMDS as the technology, fits that niche very well.—As told to Jim Barthold