The undead

(Telephony) Just when you thought it was safe to write off the broadband fixed wireless access alternative as a passing fancy, dust off your backhoe and go back to trenching the ground to lay fiber—the technology has surged up once again to haunt you.

The status of broadband wireless among competitive service providers is tenuous at best. One week it’s flaunted as the greatest thing since sliced spectrum because it’s easy and inexpensive to deploy and brings “fiber-like” features to any network. The next week people wax prophetic about the plummeting cost of fiber deployment and say broadband wireless is doomed to interim status because it couldn’t possibly match the capabilities of an all-glass network. But broadband wireless, it turns out, has about as much determination to prove itself a legitimate access method as Al Gore has to occupy the White House.

Among the technology’s oft-waffling supporters, XO Communications stands out as the Tipper of the broadband wireless set. Yesterday the company announced that it has wrapped Boston field trials of broadband wireless gear from Triton Networks Systems and will start using Triton’s so-called Invisible Fiber architecture to extend its optical core into the metro. Triton is not the first vendor XO has tapped, and it’s probably not the last. A few weeks ago, XO also inflated its fixed wireless spectrum holdings further when it bagged licenses covering 17.6 million pops in the United Kingdom.

There was a time when XO’s commitment to broadband fixed wireless seemed like it might start to waver. It has been through some tumultuous times, after all. When the company formerly known as Nextlink Communications completed its merger with Concentric Network, took one letter from each company’s moniker and recast itself as XO, the possibility of a shift away from fixed wireless to a much more fiber-centric strategy loomed large. Shortly after the merger closed, for example, XO launched a Gigabit Ethernet offering that seemed to suggest its metro loyalties were more fiber-based than they were wireless. Speculation ran rampant that XO, too, was ready to relegate fixed wireless to a mere supporting role.

It’s more likely that the company was just being subtle in its promotion of the technology--an anomaly among hype-happy competitive carriers—until it was sure the stuff was going to work out as planned or until it found vendors producing systems equipment worth its salt.

The fact is that XO does consider fiber a crucial part of its network strategy, maybe even more important than broadband wireless. But XO’s recent spectrum procurement and new spending on Triton’s technology seem to indicate that—Al Gore’s fate notwithstanding—the unwired access alternative isn’t going to be buried any time soon.

Jason Meyers is the Editorial Director for both Upstart and Telephony as well as moderator of the Broadband Networks discussion board. He also sees dead people. Contact him at jason_meyers@intertec.com.