MOTOROLA HOPES TO INITIATE RESURGENCE OF FIXED WIRELESS

Fixed broadband wireless is neither comatose nor dead; in fact, it's functioning well enough for Motorola to bring its Canopy fixed broadband wireless product out of the lab and into the marketplace.

“Back in January, when the product was ready to go and we were trying to figure out how to position it, there was nobody there,” said Tony Kobrinetz, vice president and general manager of Motorola's Canopy Wireless product group.

With large providers such as Sprint and WorldCom reporting delays and halting deployment plans for fixed wireless systems, many industry watchers wrote off the space. Beneath that negative view, however, thousands of smaller customers were helping the industry thrive, Kobrinetz said.

“If you can figure a way of getting to them economically, there's a business you can make there,” he said.

Motorola attacked the market with a product that operates in the unlicensed national information infrastructure spectrum. Kobrinetz said that while its Canopy product is a big step for Motorola, it could also mean the return of fixed wireless for a number of other stalled business plans across the sector.

While Motorola believes there's money to be made in the residential space, its latest generation of products is being used in commercial deployments by companies like airBand Networks.

“It comes down to their pricing model,” Kobrinetz said. “They can sell to a small business user with a monthly service fee that's higher than [what they can offer] a residential user.”

Texas-based airBand is providing service to customers such as Solomon Smith Barney, the NBA's Houston Rockets, Southwest Bank, Continental Airlines and Staubach Co. It also began deploying “very preliminary data trials with residential customers,” said Andrew Lombard, airBand's president and CEO.

Without a proven residential play, though, airBand is sticking to a commercial data model that is averaging a 13 1/2-month customer payback, Lombard said.

“We're not employing the Teligent/Winstar/XO model where they went in and lit a building for $300,000 and said, ‘I want to be your next telephone company so I'm going to offer you voice, data and do everything else,’” Lombard said. “We've partnered selectively.”

AirBand doesn't buy rooftops either; it works with real estate agents.

Currently, the company is deploying Axxcelera's point-to-multipoint technology and taking a hard look at non-line-of-sight gear from Motorola as well as Navini Networks, Lombard said.

“What Motorola has done is amazing. They put out a CPE from the edge side and it's $450. That's pretty good economics if I wanted to go light a circuit that I can get $500, $600 a month [in revenue] on,” he said.

Ceragon Networks' point-to-point product in the 18 GHz and 23 GHz spectrum bands has helped airBand rationalize and install links, Lombard added.

Using Ceragon in the network core is different than models airBand has used before, said Ceragon President David Ackerman. “It enables them to provide carrier-class services, which costs much less vs. using leased lines to backhaul all those point-to-multipoint radios that are providing the end users' access.”

It is, Ackerman added, “the model of a service provider that seemed to do the right things in a stressed economy.”

FOR A MORE DETAILED LOOK AT MOTOROLA'S FIXED WIRELESS PRODUCTS, READ THE OCT. 14 ISSUE OF THE BROADBAND BARRAGE NEWSLETTER. OR FIND IT ONLINE AT
WWW.TELEPHONYONLINE.COM