Card Sharks

Five North American carriers have 2.5G service launches in the works. With a Verizon launch under its belt, Sierra Wireless is looking to support all of them.

Verizon Wireless launched what it called the first 3G wireless footprint in the U.S. along the East Coast, the San Francisco Bay area and Salt Lake City in late January. It wasn't long before the event attracted a flood of criticism and media attention. But in between analyst observations that it wasn't really 3G (OK, maybe it's more like 2.5G) and competitor criticism that it wasn't much of a footprint (the Salt Lake City nod was for people attending the Olympics), a significant factor was overlooked.

While Verizon's Express Network CDMA 1XRTT service is accessible via the Kyocera 2235 data-capable handset, it is also a major step up for members of the laptop generation willing to purchase the AirCard 555 PC card modem manufactured by Sierra Wireless. That's because the AirCard lets users access the Internet from their PCs and laptops at speeds of roughly 40 kb/s up to an ideal ceiling of 144 kb/s.

Right now, Vancouver, British Columbia-based Sierra Wireless is smack at the center of the race to bring 3G to North America and at the forefront of carrier attempts to make wireless as much a laptop-enhancing data application as it is a handset voice service. Before the year is out, Sierra Wireless plans to be part of at least two more major 2.5G service launches in the U.S., along with two more in Canada.

The company's goods currently are in field trials with Sprint PCS and in lab tests with AT&T Wireless. Along with Verizon, these are the three carriers expected to define the next-gen wireless market in the U.S. for the next several months. Sierra also has support for an initial service launch by Bell Mobility in Canada and soon will do the same for Telus.

These deployments are key to helping North American vendors keep up with a 3G transition pace established by Asian and European carriers. In the U.S. in particular, the incremental move toward 3G wireless has been marked by technology delays, controversy over spectrum shortages and market readiness.

Now with the help of Sierra Wireless, in many cases, these carriers finally may be set for wireless data's next evolution.

Gary Overstreet, vice president of North America distribution for Sierra Wireless and the person who successfully managed the effort to deploy the AirCard 555 with Verizon, said it should not be such a surprise that Sierra had a piece of the market-significant Verizon launch. In fact, the road leading to this winter's Verizon deployment began more than eight years ago, when Sierra Wireless became Verizon's vendor for modem cards to support the carrier's cellular digital packet data service. Verizon has long since become the country's largest wireless network operator, with 29.4 million customers, representing a much bigger challenge for the little vendor from British Columbia.

But Verizon stuck with Sierra as its primary data card source, and Sierra got down to business.

“Verizon told us that CDMA would be their data direction,” Overstreet said. “We told them what we could do and what the timeline for availability of the modem card would be. In December 2000, we announced a formal supply agreement with them for CDMA 1X data cards.”

Last summer, much of the action revolving around the AirCard and Verizon's launch prep shifted to the carrier's headquarters and product lab in Bedminster, N.J. Sierra's product development and testing work for Verizon garnered Sierra's engineers an awful lot of frequent flyer miles, as they regularly flew the 2500-mile route between Vancouver and Bedminster.

“We were rotating engineers between Vancouver and New Jersey,” said Overstreet. “There were a lot of travel requirements and a lot of pressure to make sure the service was ready to go.”

As summer turned to fall, Verizon implemented Project Liberty Bell, in which they invited a small group of elite customers and partners from companies like IBM to Philadelphia and gave them Sierra's AirCard to use in a field test — not that the AirCard was completely ready for prime time.

“We warned them that it wasn't bug-free, but it was a good way to seed the market for what wireless data was capable of,” said Overstreet. As a result, Sierra and Verizon learned a lot about what worked and what didn't.

“Tweaks needed to be made in our product and in our processes and packaging as it related to Verizon's activations process,” said Overstreet. Namely, Sierra Wireless needed to make some quick fixes with its AirCard software because it would work on some operating systems when installed by users, but not on all.

Sierra also had to learn a lot about Verizon's shipping processes. “They wanted to scan the ESNs when they got the cards delivered so that they are immediately registered on the network,” Overstreet said. “We had to learn the process and make sure the ESNs were readily accessible when the cards reached the warehouse. It's a logistical thing where we want to make sure the service delivery process is not slowed down by us in any way.”

The company admitted that it must get used to that pressure of new service launches, and it is sending that same message to its own component vendors. “There is increasing pressure on us from carriers to get them toward 3G and to get next-gen products on the market,” Overstreet said. “Carriers have said how they will move toward 3G, but now it is critical to get things done as early as possible this year. We pressure our third-party providers to hustle.”

The AirCard 555 is now available from Verizon for $299. Overstreet said he cannot divulge how many AirCards Verizon is buying, but said Sierra Wireless has tested its card modem in multiple Verizon markets to ensure its usability as Verizon expands the Express Network service.

“Verizon is dual-band, but bands can vary by market,”said Overstreet. “We mutually agreed with Verizon on a testing plan, and we believe they are comfortable that we can now do this anywhere.

“As we work with other carriers, we now have a lot of data to share with them about how to launch this kind of service.”