Broadband at the border

There's a banana boat in San Diego harbor. No, really, it's a banana boat, with the Dole logo on the forward hull. (That's sailor-speak for up near the front.) I'm in a van with four people from Flarion Technologies and we're heading for the Mexican border about 15 miles away — or are we actually driving toward Coronado Island?

Regardless, we're moving at a brisk 42 mph, and we're watching movie trailers on the Internet.

Don't believe it? That's why Flarion brought this demonstration to the International Wireless Symposium in San Diego. The company wants to convert the non-believers in its mobile broadband technology, so like in those corny movies back in the '40s, the company said “Hey, kids, let's put on a road show!” OK, I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

Flarion's demo involves its COLT (Cell on Light Truck) and the aforementioned van. There's a brilliant Baja mid-day sun outside, but it's cool, dark and clinical inside the COLT. The company's RadioRouter base station, powered by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology, is putting out a three-mile-wide signal, which the Flarion folks say would be even stronger if there was not a major naval base and a small globe-spanning ocean just several feet away.

Flarion isn't just doing OFDM, but its own IP-based Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Handoff (FLASH) OFDM. That's where the movie trailer comes in — and it's not just any movie, but “Blackhawk Down,” a film which, other than being remembered by future generations as starring young Josh Hartnett during his patriotic action hero phase and grizzled Tom Sizemore during his pre-domestic battery phase, contains an explosion or two. Or 12.

Those explosions and the art direction alone make it a fat file that isn't going to make much sense at all if the signal gets massively degraded. So, to test it, we pile into the van (the marketing guy in the back, of course) and start driving away.

As we get further away from the COLT, the signal remains crystal clear, no degradation whatsoever of the multiple explosion scenes and not a word of Josh's monosyllabic dialogue is lost or out of place. Just after the three-mile mark, the signal drops off, as expected, but when we pull a legal California U-turn and head back toward the COLT, the signal is re-established without delay.

At $10 per pop or $150 per subscriber, Flarion is hoping it has the kind of solution that can fly under the radar of carriers' capex concerns. And lower capex for broadband means more money for bananas.