Sprint delivers wireless broadband to Windy City

(Telephony) Sprint Broadband Direct hit its high point yesterday--literally. The fixed broadband wireless company launched high-speed data delivery service to residential and commercial customers in a 35-mile radius of the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Customers within range of the signal can receive up to 5 Mbps of downloaded data and a 256 Kbps return, said Scott Kanady, general manager of Sprint Broadband Direct in Chicago. The service costs $49.95 for residential customers and $199.95 for businesses.

Sprint is using a supercell approach to the market--beaming the signal on a wide swatch up to 35 miles from the tower--to target residential and small business customers.

"We would go after large corporate customers in terms of a telecommuter type of situation," said Kanady. “Using a VPN is very desirable to companies that are having a lot of people working out of their houses."

The service is ideal for campus environments, he said.

"What this really works well is a college-type situation," Kanady said. "Using a wireless LAN, kids can sit around campus and surf on the Internet right out in the open air."

Chicago marks the 14th market launch for Sprint Broadband Direct. Running off the Sears Tower offers several obvious advantages in addressing the line-of-sight needs of direct broadband wireless, he said.

For example, a church that was wired for the service 28 miles from an antenna got better download speeds with fixed broadband wireless than with a fractional T1 line, Kanady said.

"The fractional T1 was downloading a 300 kilobits a second, and we were downloading at 330 kilobits," he said. "It's really cool. And it's versatile on the download up to 5 megs."