When wireless is not wireless

It’s easy to confuse, or equate, broadband wireless access with the mobile cellular communications that we’ve lived with for 25 years. After all, wireless is wireless, right? Sure, just like Fords and Mercedes are both cars. But like cars, different wireless technologies are designed to serve different markets.

It is important to note some key distinctions.

Cellular is optimized for mobile voice calling; data was added as an upgrade. BWA is purpose-built for high-speed Internet connections, initially fixed; voice, specifically voice over IP (VoIP), follows as an application.

Cellular uses legacy circuit switching technology. Broadband wireless is designed with an all-IP architecture from the get-go.

Current cellular 3G technologies are designed to deliver peak download speeds of 7–14 Mb/s in the same spectrum as voice. BWA technologies, currently WiMAX (802.16e) and the coming long-term evolution (LTE), are designed to operate at up to 10 times those levels in fixed applications and in designated spectrum bands such as 2.5 GHz, 700 MHz or Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) 1.7/2.1 GHz.

Cellular is a true mobile technology. Calls are handed off between cell sites as the caller moves around on foot, in a vehicle or on a transit system. BWA generally operates in a point-to-multipoint configuration — that is, from a base station to many users in fixed locations.

At this stage, “mobile broadband” is really more portability than mobility. And this is where the confusion arises.

For now, BWA customers use the service mainly at one location, say, their homes or offices, but they can port their laptops from place to place within the coverage area, similar to a Wi-Fi hotspot only bigger. Porting a laptop from place to place, however, is vastly different than talking on a cell phone in a car rolling down the highway. Moreover, the infrastructure needed to support mobile megabits is humongous!

Granted, the standards are evolving so that LTE will support a true mobile broadband service at some point in the future. Just know that LTE is called “long-term” for good reason.

On the business end, the early money in BWA will mainly come from recurring monthly charges from fixed Internet access connections, rather than cellular minutes of use (MOU) and kilobytes per month of data. The first BWA deployments are aimed at getting broadband connections into underserved or unserved areas, where telephone wires or cable TV plant can’t reach. BWA roaming revenues will come from authentication charges for Internet access, not MOUs, incurred when one carrier authenticates another carrier’s customer in its coverage area.

Now here’s the really interesting part. BWA is more a wireline carrier than a wireless company play!

The recent AWS and 700 MHz spectrum auction winners included, along with the Tier 1 national carriers, a number of Tier 2 and 3 Independent telcos and cablecos. Although wireless technology is new to most of them, these wireline carriers have an opportunity to leverage broadband spectrum, both in licensed and unlicensed bands, by extending BWA services over the air to customers where their wired plant comes up short.

More importantly, they can deploy 4G wireless systems with greater capital efficiency, on the order of hundreds of dollars per subscriber, compared to several times that for 3G cellular and thousands per subscriber for fiber cable–based systems.

We should know by now that one broadband technology solution does not fit all applications. BWA fills an important role in extending high-speed Internet connections to customers over a wide area, rapidly and more cost-effectively than wires, fibers or conventional wireless technologies.

Yeah, it’s wireless. Just don’t think of it as wireless.