W.A.T.C.H. out!

Rural Ohio fixed wireless provider ready to move beyond television

Tom Knippen understands his fixed broadband wireless subscribers want to do more than watch television. Thus, the vice president and general manager of W.A.T.C.H. TV is rolling out high-speed data services in Lima, Ohio, and its surrounding environs under the name W.A.T.C.H. Cobra and as part of an overall analog-to-digital transformation of his service.

Knippen knows a couple other factors play in his favor. The system's infrastructure makes it relatively easy to deliver high-speed data, there's demand for it at $39.95 per month, and the competition makes it imperative to start doing it.

“Time Warner [Cable] has a very upgraded system here,” Knippen said. “They put out digital [TV]. Road Runner [high-speed data] is throughout our area.” Besides that, Sprint claims DSL also is available in the area.

Lima — which Knippen jokes stands for “Lost in Middle America” — is not atypical of the high-speed data battleground and the companies that are slugging it out for relatively small subscriber wins. W.A.T.C.H. TV is part of a small-town telecommunications juggernaut — Benton Ridge Telephone — that, in addition to being an incumbent local exchange carrier, also partners with the town's cellular provider. “We are a very diverse company,” Knippen said.

In a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario, Benton Ridge Telephone has about 1200 voice subscribers, while the broadband side has 9050 MMDS subscribers and another 1050 wired cable television subscribers.

Traditional cable subscribers are attached to a hybrid system that uses multichannel multipoint distribution service (MMDS) to deliver satellite entertainment channels and coaxial cable to add local ones. The MMDS network is also the foundation of W.A.T.C.H. Cobra.

The current analog system is inefficient because it has limited channel capacity, and those channels consume bandwidth. The first essential step in moving to two-way high-speed data services is to digitize the video portion of the network. So far the company has digitized 40 channels, including its existing MMDS lineup, HBO, Showtime and Disney.

While about 7000 subscribers have digital service, no one yet is getting high-speed two-way data — that service is being marketed while the data infrastructure is built.

W.A.T.C.H. currently is offering one-way data using a phone return and 2.4 GHz unlicensed wireless band in the area near Lima's downtown. “That's going very well for us, so we know the two-way equipment we're ordering from [suppliers] Andrew and Vyyo is going to work and be popular,” Knippen said.

He added that customers — while not chasing W.A.T.C.H. TV trucks down Lima's byways — are “calling us daily saying, ‘Can you get me two-way out here right now?’” In fact, its popularity may become a hindrance as W.A.T.C.H. Cobra may not reach everyone who wants it.

“Our biggest problem in competing with Time Warner in this market is trees,” Knippen said. “Line-of-sight is a significant problem with MMDS.”

Andrew Corporation, which entered the MMDS business about 18 months ago, is working on that, said Jim Yard, vice president of broadband wireless systems. As part of the effort, the company has scalable modulation through a relationship with Vyyo.

The line-of-sight hurdle won't slow down high-speed data deployment, he said, because Andrew is using the existing transmission tower that W.A.T.C.H. TV uses for video and cellular service. MMDS can broadcast to a 35-mile radius from that antenna (barring, of course, line-of-sight difficulties).

Vyyo's “hex” technology comes into play on the return path because it delivers higher upstream speeds. That makes more bandwidth available to subscribers and enables a system to better handle things like quality of service, which could lead to voice over IP, although that's not a goal in Lima.

All that's important now, Knippen said, is that digitization leads to high-speed data, and high-speed data lets subscribers do more than just watch TV — no matter what the company's name implies.