Fixed wireless broadband solutions: Five quick wins for the downturn

In a down economy, making your numbers – or at least minimizing the slide – is all about finding and capitalizing on quick-to-close opportunities. For telecom service providers, that means not only serving long-time customers well and planning for future growth but finding some easy win opportunities that actually may be even easier to land if you position the solution as an antidote to tough economic times.

One technology that has the potential to play a role in such scenarios is fixed wireless broadband, which can be deployed – and if necessary taken down – quickly to save money and time versus traditional wireline network deployments. Fixed wireless technology – in either point-to-point or point-to-multi-point applications – can support a variety of services, including voice data and video, and deployments, including indoor and outdoor locations.

We talked with vendors, analysts and service providers to come up with this list of five applications and solution areas where service providers can match this flexible technology with some surprising application areas to score perhaps not completely expected, but nonetheless welcome, wins.

1. Government
Local governments have increasing needs for affordable, easy-to-deploy communications infrastructure, particularly for public safety applications. The application here is to deploy video surveillance cameras in key public areas – including high-crime locations, utility locations such as water processing or power plants and in support of high-profile events – and then use fixed wireless systems to haul the video back to a central location for monitoring. Such systems can also provide primary or back-up communications for police and fire department first-responder capabilities. In particular, the broadband connections can help local departments move beyond voice communications with the ability to share maps, power grids and other documents via fixed wireless broadband links. And as we’ll touch on multiple times in this story, public communications is likely to see funding support in pending federal economic stimulus bills, making this an opportunity worth seizing for governments and service providers alike.

2. Transportation/Traffic Management
This might be an unspoken application, but with local government budgets squeezed, traffic enforcement can become a vital revenue generation mechanism. And putting more officers on the street isn’t the answer. Instead, many municipalities are moving to camera enforcement of intersection stop lights, with fixed wireless links bringing camera data back to a central location where violators are determined and ticketed via mail. Once such cameras and communications capabilities are in place, the system can pay additional benefits, such as providing in-route public works communications capabilities. Finally, some local governments are leveraging such networks for even more advanced applications, such as placing stress sensors on bridges or monitoring icing conditions on roads – with wireless networks feeding the telemetry data back to a central location for analysis. Deploying and managing those networks is a big opportunity for service providers. 

3. Education
The education market – another opportunity with potential federal and state funding – breaks down into a couple of segments. Video surveillance is of interest to some school districts to secure key areas, such as playgrounds or bus loading zones. Inter-building communications within a school district is also of growing interest, with a daisy-chain or star deployment of a fixed wireless system a good approach for linking together elementary, middle and high schools, along with administration buildings, within an individual community. Finally, such broadband networks, once in place, can be leveraged to bring Internet access into classrooms, at times more affordably and flexibly – ie, without requiring major wiring projects – than traditional network solutions.

4. Ports/Airports
National security applications such as port and airport security may not typically fall to traditional telecom service providers – specialty value-added resellers tend to dominate this solution area – but it’s an opportunity worth tracking. Video surveillance, redundant secure networking and increasingly mobile broadband capabilities are all becoming must-have services at large transportation hubs like public airports and regional shipping ports. Advanced applications like RFID tracking also require network capabilities. All of those applications could potentially call for the networking expertise of the local service provider.

5. Broadband as an economic necessity
Our last category isn’t so much a solution opportunity as a general theme that is driving broadband deployment in all forms: broadband Internet access is now an economic necessity for all Americans. In a downturn, in particular, broadband networks provide access to online training and education; Web-based job searches; work-from-home and telework opportunities and more. To that end, wireless ISP is still one of the biggest use cases for fixed wireless broadband technology, especially in low-density, rural areas. Such networks typically focus on residential services, but increasingly rural businesses have increasing communications requirements as well, making leased line and business service replacement a strong market for fixed wireless as well. With broadband deployment incentives likely to be available in federal stimulus packages, moving a rural or small community beyond dial-up to true broadband via fixed wireless could be an opportunity worth pursuing for many small, independent providers.