Data's Back Roads

Apr 15, 2001 12:00 PM, Marcia Martinek, Senior Editor

Ron and Tricia Perkins and their two young daughters live on the far side of the digital divide — about 70 miles from the transmission site belonging to Alaska Wireless Cable (AWC) (www.awcable.com), outside Fairbanks. They have no electricity or telephone lines. Instead they rely on a generator system that supplies the electricity to run their household appliances. If they want to leave home in the winter, they travel by dog sled, snowmobile or on an airplane equipped with skis. In summer, there is a road accessible by 4-wheel drive.

“Before wireless was introduced to us, we relied on a CB radio and a radio phone, which is just like a CB except you have the capability to dial out to a specific number,” Tricia Perkins said. Both are open air, so there was no privacy. She also noted that when the military were using a bombing range in the area, the radio phone would not work.

“That worried me as a mom, because if an emergency occurred, what would we do?” she said.

Today the Perkins family has a wireless Internet connection, wireless TV and, most recently, an IP telephony phone, all from AWC.

The Internet has proven a big help in home-schooling the children.

“I can order my curriculum over the Internet, and there are so many sites for even this young age,” Perkins said. The girls, ages 5 and 6, have picked up computer skills quickly and are taking music lessons through the Internet.

In February, the family became one of the first to get AWC's IP telephony service. Now they not only can make private phone calls, but they do so at a lower cost than with the radio phone.

“Wireless services have been a godsend to us and the many people on their own as far as communications is concerned,” Perkins said.

Joe Rourke and his partners bought AWC five years ago, and he moved from Hawaii to serve as general manager.

“What we bought was an operation with five (TV) channels — only video and only 340 subscribers,” Rourke said. He quickly added 23 channels and increased subscribers to 5,000. But about a year and a half ago, with the costs of programming increasing and his margins decreasing, Rourke started looking at other business opportunities, namely data.

He selected three vendors and began evaluating their equipment. In the end, he decided Hybrid's system (www.hybrid.com) was the one that was the most robust and offered the flexibility and application capability that he wanted.

Rourke first bought the Hybrid downstream system. He went down to San Jose, CA, took a class from Hybrid, and got the system up and running. Later he went back for the 2-way system.

“We've been up on 2-way for 3½ months, but 1½ months of that was pure hell,” Rourke said. The Hybrid equipment worked well, but there were other problems.

AWC has what Rourke describes as a “unique system.” The transmitter is located on top of a 2,500-foot-high mountain, Ester Dome. In the winter, temperatures at the site can be -60°, with 10 to 15 feet of snow and blizzard-force winds. If something goes wrong, you can't send a tech up there and get it fixed.

In setting up the 2-way system, there initially was no way to get information that went from the subscriber up to Ester Dome, back down to the office in Fairbanks. So Rourke set up an 18GHz microwave link. There also were some problems when several transceivers, from another vendor, were defective, but ultimately the problem was discovered.

“We've been on the air with five nines reliability for two months,” Rourke said in March. “We're out of the testing curve and preparing for a marketing advance to start putting people on our system.”

At the time he had 100 data customers, with 80 more on a waiting list. Of these, about 60% were businesses; of the remaining 40% residential, half lived in town and half were rural to isolated.

Rourke also has begun testing IP telephony as another potential business stream. He has placed four Hippo (www.hippoinc.com) IP phones with customers that include the Perkins family. Unlike voice over IP, which involves use of a computer, the IP-telephony phones don't require computers. The voice packets travel over the Internet to the town where the call is to terminate, and then are transformed and placed on the PSTN, just as if the call were made in that town. All calls cost a flat rate of 5.5¢ a minute, which amounts to a considerable savings when you consider that most in-state, long-distance calls in Alaska are 14¢ a minute. Calls to the “lower 48” are between 7¢ and 10¢ a minute.

Another advantage is that the IP-telephony phones help circumvent the inevitable backlog of calls on holidays such as Mother's Day when it's extremely difficult to make long-distance calls in Alaska, Rourke said. The quality might not be quite as good as wireline, but it is better than VoIP, he said, comparing it to cellular.

Another company that also started out in wireless cable but is moving into wireless Internet delivery is Sioux Valley Wireless (SVW) in Colman, SD (www.svtv.com).

According to Joel Brick, SVW technical director, the company was able to obtain a developmental authorization from the FCC in 1998 to begin testing 2-way MMDS service. He uses Vyyo's 2-way equipment (www.vyyo.com).

Now SVW has 5,600 television customers and 400 2-way, high-speed, data-service customers, of which about a third are businesses. These are not just rural customers; some are in cities where there is direct competition from DSL and cable modems.

Brick said his business strategy is not to over-promise. SVW uses a bandwidth-management system so that customers get reliable service at the speeds that are promised, he said.

“Our pricing and our speed is competitive with any service out there,” Brick said. Speed also can be tiered to the needs of the business.

In the residential area, the price of the customer-premises equipment (CPE) still is high, but Brick hopes that will come down as there are more MMDS deployments.

Currently residents are charged $200 for a data install if they are not wireless cable customers and $150 if they are. The actual cost of the CPE is $800.

Yet, Brick believes he needs to lock up the customer base now. His two installers can hook up 25 to 30 customers a month.

One customer who appreciates his high-speed wireless Internet connection from Sioux Valley is Jim Enga, general manager of Omni-Pro software, an energy-management software developer. Enga works from the South Dakota farm where he has lived most of his life, located six miles from the nearest city. Omni-Pro's sister company, Internet Energy Systems (www.internetenergysystems.com), which handles sales, distribution and technical support, is located in Virginia. Enga previously struggled with a 56kb/s dial-up modem and was never able to get speeds greater than 22kb/s. Now he gets a connection speed 50 times greater than before.

“I can have my cake and eat it too … a high-tech business in a low-tech area,” Enga said.

Another high-tech business in a low-tech area is farming. The agricultural business is becoming increasingly sophisticated, but farms are rural, and rural areas aren't known for abundant deployments of high-speed data. That, however, is changing.

Shawn Wollen, a Wilcox, NE, corn and soybean farmer wasn't about to wait for technology to catch up with him. He and some other farmers decided to form their own wireless Internet company, AxtellTech (www.axtelltech.com). They are the investors, and Carl Garaffa is the president and the self-described geek.

Garaffa earlier owned a few dial-up ISPs but found that busy signals and a lack of speed were the stumbling blocks to dial-up service. And if someone wants a second phone line in rural Nebraska, there is a long wait.

He studied wireless for a year and, like Rourke, bought products from three manufacturers to see how they would work.

“BreezeCom (www.breezecom.com) was the most expensive, but it offered a lot of features that were important,” Garaffa said.

The most crucial was security, and BreezeCom's frequency-hopping technology provided both security and QoS, he said.

“I didn't want a solution that was ‘kind of good enough’ and maybe some day would be good enough,” Garaffa said. “I wanted to offer something that was good enough to offer everything wireless and broadband was heralded to offer.”

Garaffa's vision extends beyond the communities in Nebraska being served by AxtellTech. He also has formed a consortium of wireless ISPs in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Nebraska. Known as ATW (AxtellTech Wholesale), the consortium's members soon will serve more than 160 communities in rural America. Garaffa holds seminars teaching how to deploy the equipment and run the service. He also works with the ISPs to coordinate service, “so we don't bump two guys up against one another in the same community,” he said. “Let's face it, this is rural. If you end up with three guys in there competing, you'll probably end up with three guys going bankrupt, and no wireless service.”

ATW helps the ISPs work together as independents, he said. Although he does not tell the others what prices to charge, Garaffa does offer a turnkey business solution with a built-in business plan.

AxtellTech's service has one unique characteristic: It's mobile. Put a card inside the laptop, mount a 4-inch antenna attached to a magnet on the top of the vehicle, and that's all it takes. If the vehicle is a tractor, the farmer can access the Internet as he's working in his fields so that he can check the weather radar and commodities prices as well as send e-mail.

But AxtellTech's mobility also has other applications. The ISP is working with the Minden, NE, hospital to put units in the ambulances so that doctors at the hospital can get audio, video and data as an ambulance is speeding down the road at 60 mph.

Garaffa also offers an add-on service where a farmer can buy a laptop from ATW with Windows 2000 Professional, and ATW creates a volume on one of its servers to back up that farmers' books. If the laptop dies, the farmer can call Garaffa and within 24 hours, he has a new laptop with all of his data on it.

Currently the AxtellTech Web site features Nebraska Congressman Tom Osbourn saying, “At this time, broadband wireless is the best way to provide farmers and rural Nebraska with high-speed Internet access.”

This spring, the Web site plans to offer FarmCam so people can watch farming.

“We're putting three cameras on Shawn's (Wollen) tractor,” Garaffa said. “One camera will be on the John Deere logo so we can get some advertising dollars from John Deere. We're hoping a whole educational process will come out of it.”

Wollen clearly is pleased with how the wireless Internet service is going.

“I've talked to people in bigger cities and they say, ‘Heck, we don't have that here. You guys are out in a town of 300, and you've got higher-speed Internet than we do.’”

Being a small, rural operator doesn't mean you're not on the cutting edge. AWC's Rourke said he feels as if he's always the beta test and always the first, something he describes as a double-edged sword.

“According to Hybrid, we were one of the first operations to go fully 2-way and divide up our flow,” he said. “With Pacific Monolithic (www.pacmono.com), we were the first to go encrypted. We were the first to deploy our transceivers.

“I guess it's because we're small enough,” he speculated. “We don't have to go through a lot of departments and rigmarole. We just go for it.”

Hybrid's system (www.hybrid.com) eliminates the need for Alaska Wireless Cable's (AWC) (www.awcable.com) customers to have dedicated phone lines for Internet connections and provides them with data-transmission speeds 50 to 100 times faster than those of a traditional 28.8kb/s modem.

With the Hybrid system, a customer simply turns on his computer and launches an application such as an Internet browser or FTP routine. The customer's request for information is sent through a Hybrid router (modem) up and out through the digital transmitter/receiver on the customer's rooftop (the antenna) to the AWC network router at AWC's radio tower.

The data is either retrieved directly from the AWC servers or from the Internet over AWC's high-speed backbone connection. It then is sent from the AWC transmission site back over dedicated frequencies to the customer's antenna, where it is passed to the Hybrid router and then to the customer's computer or LAN.

Most small carriers serve rural markets where a basic Hybrid single-cell design is most efficient, said Michael Greenbaum, Hybrid president. Hybrid offers all of its customers on-site consultation and training, which is important for carriers with limited resources.

Sioux Valley Wireless (SVW) (www.svtv.com) provides wireless cable TV and high-speed Internet access using Vyyo's (www.vyyo.com) point-to-multipoint technology based on IP in the MMDS frequency range. The Internet data microwave signals are transmitted by Vyyo's V3000 hub from the local communications tower to subscribers within 35 miles of the tower. From there the signal travels to a small dish antenna, mounted on the roof or exterior wall of the subscriber's home.

The Vyyo V251 modem receives the signal from the antenna and brings it into the home for Internet use.

Joel Brick, SVW technical director, said the system has two towers, one east of Sioux Falls and one north. His system uses a super-cell configuration.

AxtellTech (www.axtelltech.com) uses BreezeCom's (www.breezecom.com) BreezeAccess II system operating in the license-free ISM band at 2.4GHz, delivering high-speed wireless Internet access. Once the wireless infrastructure is in place, it can be scaled upward to support thousands of subscribers per cell. BreezeAccess II operates in time-division-duplex mode using frequency-hopping technology for secure service. It is optimized for data and voice communications.

Shawn Wollen, AxtellTech investor, said the service enables hopping from town to town with an antenna in each town. Although the initial network has a few holes in it, interested farmers are asking for antenna installations on their property to better use the system.

“This summer the FCC will allow us