WISPs WAIT ON INNOVATION

Regional wireless ISPs operating in unlicensed frequency bands might not have the buying power to influence the pace of technology development, but deficiencies in current non-line-of-sight equipment are at least part of the reason they cultivate other methods for dealing with spectrum interference.

“After testing just about every NLOS product that claimed to address interference, there doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution yet, though someone tells me every week they have it,” said an executive at one wireless ISP.

“We’ve tested a lot of NLOS products, but they aren’t really there yet,” added Eric Warren, vice president of marketing and business development at California-based SkyPipeline. Graham Barnes, CEO of Nextweb--which announced a merger with SkyPipeline this week--also has gone on the record with similar comments about current NLOS equipment.

Sources from the vendor community insist that the shortcomings are limited to previous generations of products, as well as a small handful of current ones that employ omni-directional antenna technology.

“We like to tell the WISPs to just say no to omnis,” said Patrick Leary, chief technology evangelist at Alvarion and an executive member of the License-Exempt Alliance. “If they already use omnis, they should put up another one, unless it’s a WISP in an ultra-rural area that needs broad coverage and isn’t going to interfere with anyone else.”

Part of the original advantage of omni-directional technology was the idea that “if you shoot a signal off in all directions, it’s somehow going to get there,” said Phil Bolt, CEO of Orthogon Systems. Vendors have since moved onto other kinds of point-to-point NLOS schemes, such as Orthogon’s multi-beam space-time coding technology, which pre-shapes a signal to travel around obstacles.

Warren said he’d still like to see innovations on the NLOS front that make the technology easier to use, such as self-installation and self-provisioning capabilities.