Is this the year?

Every year, broadband fixed wireless seems steps away from falling in line with cable and DSL as a high-speed data delivery method. And every year, the promise goes unfulfilled.

In 2001, broadband fixed wireless seems perched near the catbird's seat. It can quick-install point-to-point and point-to-multipoint high-speed data delivery over huge swaths of licensed and unlicensed spectrum, obviating the need to trench or hang wires while delivering high-speed data to bandwidth-hungry customers in untouched urban, suburban and rural markets. It's even starting to work out line-of-sight obstacles.

Emerging technologies are working on this from several angles. The supercell delivery, which is great if you're in the Los Angeles basin or Phoenix and your shared customer base is limited, is being abetted by a microcell approach that bounces signals off strategically placed antennas. Other technological innovations vector the signal patterns to deliver more power from more directions with less interference.

In addition to technology issues, fixed wireless has also had a problem with funding: It never seemed to have any. But now Sprint is pouring cash and resources into making multichannel multipoint distribution service (MMDS) happen residentially, and WorldCom is using MMDS for commercial customers.

Sprint is out of the gates and commercial players are pouring money into the business, but AT&T's wireless efforts are flagging and WorldCom is undergoing a corporate transformation.

But maybe a big-time player isn't what's really needed for the smaller residential markets, says Andy Belt, an executive vice president at Adventis. “There's something to be said for having a lot of different players with different ideas about how to make a viable service work,” he says. “If you have a market dominated by a duopoly, then the risk is that you won't have that kind of creative destruction, or creative ferment.”

That point could be moot. The U.S. economy, in its first free-fall of the new century, is causing everyone to look more closely at the purse strings. “In the U.S., there's evidence that there may be some additional postponement in terms of deployment, but that may not necessarily be the case in other areas of the world — primarily Europe,” says Paul Kennett, senior research director of Pioneer Consulting.

Perhaps the market has cooled, but some vendors remain positive.

“Domestic demand is huge,” says Gordon Moller, North American marketing and sales vice president for point-to-point supplier Ceragon Networks, which is pitching gigabit Ethernet technology at large corporations. “The industrialized sophisticated economies are going to deploy this first because there's demand there… and ability to pay.”

Product price, of course, influences ability to pay.

Several factors have caused fixed wireless services to never quite gain success, Adventis' Belt says. “The key issues are more oriented around the fact that they haven't been able to get to a breakthrough value proposition,” he says.

If that's the case, then Cirronet may be onto something.

“A key barrier to entry to the development of this mass market is getting under $400 per subscriber total cost,” says Robert Gemmell, Cirronet's CEO and chairman of the board. “That's everything: CPE unit, antenna, cable, passives, everything on the subscriber end.”

It also includes self-installation, another challenging issue that wireless must overcome. “The critical thing with the U.S. market is the competition,” says Jim Yard, vice president of Andrew Corp.'s broadband wireless systems group. “There's a huge difference in infrastructure, pricing levels and so forth.”

A low-cost product, he says, will “solve some of the more challenging things” and help wireless operators get to market. Once there, though, the plethora of technologies will create confusion.

“You have so many companies that come out with new technologies that it's very difficult to pick the best one,” says Volker Tegtmeyer, market development manager for Siemens' broadband wireless access solutions group.

Unlike cable, where the DOCSIS standardization effort has been breathtakingly fast and successful, and DSL, where lagging standards are slowing down deployments, broadband fixed wireless appears to be taking a first-come, first-served market approach.

“Sprint is rolling out their network with a technology that is obsolete already,” says Tegtmeyer. “Sprint probably takes the right approach by deploying and checking out the market and customer acceptance with the existing technology and using that to evaluate the new technology.”

Spike Broadband wants to leverage cable's DOCSIS progress.

“When you try to deploy a fixed broadband wireless product, you really have to target [cable and DSL] cost points,” says Tony Masters, Spike's chief technology officer and engineering vice president. “Right now you have to look around at the available technology that can support those cost points. We've settled on DOCSIS as a starting point, and this will be growing with us as with [orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)] solutions as well.”

The approach has its supporters.

“You're starting to see a movement that says maybe DOCSIS is the way to do this,” says Troy Trenchard, wireless access product marketing director at Cisco Systems. “I know our customers are perfectly happy with it because they're able to deliver services that they're familiar with with a quality of service.”

Cisco's standards effort is, like most others in the industry, focused on OFDM. “That's a very interesting technology,” says Cirronet's Grimmell. “The issue with this technology is that it does not hit the mass market price point.”

But it alleviates technological hurdles.

“So far as we know and so far as anyone in the industry is claiming right now, we have the only working non-line-of-sight fixed wireless system,” says Barbara Heine, marketing manager for NextNet Wireless, which is using OFDM “with special signal processing” in Waseca, Minn.

It's also experimental. It won't even go into beta trials until the third quarter of this year.

NextNet is using a cellular approach. That itself brings new challenges.

“When you go to a non-line-of-sight with lower base station and lower CPE heights, the path will change more dramatically, more quickly,” says Malik Audeh, director of wireless systems for Hybrid Networks, Sprint's primary supplier.

Mobile fixed wireless may be oxymoronic, but it's not moronic, says Patrick Pacifico, marketing and product management vice president of Wave Wireless Networking, which is betting its future on proprietary packet hopping technology.

Wave's technology is “like having a wireless cable modem or having wireless DSL service. You're creating a bi-directional high-speed Internet wireless pipe,” says Pacifico.

The proprietary gear is just part of addressing the wireless challenge, Pacifico says.

“We have to get out there and educate the market about the benefits of packet hop and how it differs from OFDM and how it can be complementary to the benefits that OFDM brings to the marketplace at the same time,” he says.