WINDOW FOR FIXED WIRELESS SLOWLY CLOSING IN U.S.

Players must cooperate or resign themselves to overseas work

The question hovered over last week's Broadband Wireless World Forum in Anaheim like a vulture seeking a place to roost. Tom Andrus merely voiced it.

“Does wireless matter anymore?” asked Andrus, EarthLink's vice president of products and services and the opening day keynoter. “I think it does.”

But Andrus included a few qualifiers to show that things will not be easy — and that broadband wireless might not matter for long as a high-speed access provider. “DSL is deploying everywhere,” Andrus said. “Cable services are getting better, and the window for fixed wireless is getting smaller.”

Andrus handles EarthLink's broadband business, working with cable, DSL, and — increasingly — satellite providers. Their common trait is high prices, so a lower-priced wireless entry would rake in revenues, he said. But first the industry must clean up its act. “We need to look at consolidating,” he said. “The industry has to cooperate.”

Last year's conference in San Francisco was marked by contentious panel sessions that were a turn-off for Andrus. This year, while not as contentious, personal agendas and technologies continued to override more altruistic industrywide goals. “The competition for each of you is not in this room,” he said. “The competition is DSL and cable.”

The warning may have fallen on deaf ears — or it may just have been deemed inapplicable. The industry's customer base encourages fragmentation. It ranges from small and medium-sized businesses to corporations using a plethora of national and international spectrums. On top of that, increasingly capable free space optics (FSO) technologies aimed at commercial customers are joining wireless' existing RF transmission methods.

“We are extremely bullish for the size of the market for carrier-grade, through-the-window free space optics,” said Dan Hesse, TeraBeam's president, chairman and CEO. FSO picks up where the nationwide fiber backbone leaves off, serving the last mile because it serves cities more effectively than fiber, he said.

That's only true for Tier 1 cities, said Robert Riordan, vice president of Nsight Telservices. Nsight's upper Midwest footprint includes Tier 2 and Tier 3 communities that easily could be served by fiber, but no one wants all the bandwidth fiber provides. However, those markets present other challenges.

“We in Green Bay, [Wis.] love our trees,” Riordan said, which isn't necessarily true for local multipoint distribution service.

To get around that, Riordan uses Radiant's mesh technology because it grows by using existing customers to launch signals to new customers. “Are there customers out there in rural America? You bet there are,” he said. “This is a message to all our vendors to not ignore rural areas.”

One of those vendors, Hybrid Networks, agreed that Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets are ripe for the wireless picking because “we can deliver solutions at lower cost, much quicker than DSL and cable,” said Hybrid President and CEO Michael Greenbaum.

Nevertheless, he said, the company's direction is all international.

Most wireless vendors are employing similar strategies. Alvarion, the combination of BreezeCOM and Floware, pursues international customers with a differentiated voice and data offering while waiting for the U.S. economy to rebound.

Alvarion's U.S. product will be data-centric because that's what the market wants, said Zvi Slonimsky, Alvarion's CEO.

Alvarion aims at a wide range of customers, including independent telcos, utilities, local cell operators, some regional ISPs and some municipalities. It's building technology that covers an equally wide swath of spectrums from 2.4 to 26 GHz.

The strategy “spreads us relatively thin,” Slonimsky said. Nevertheless, such a broad strategy makes Alvarion “the gorilla of the market,” he said.

Ceragon Networks, on the other hand, has focused its efforts on cellular backhaul. “It's not a tight focus,” said Shraga Katz, Ceragon's president and CEO. “We are very open — 36 countries with 100 customers.”

The strategy conserves cash and helps Ceragon survive the economic downturn. “It's bad times. It's not a growing market,” Katz said. “Operators are very careful with spending money. Once the market is going again, you can get a bigger share.”

But by the time the market gets going again, it may be too late for broadband wireless. Now is the time to act, Andrus said. “Decide what the future will look like and make it happen,” he said. “We have a huge opportunity ahead of us.”