Fueling Wireless-Broadband Access

Everyone wants high-speed data. The fixed-wireless broadband industry is revving up to deliver it first.

Can this be the breakout year for wireless-broadband access? Buddy Pickle, Teligent president & COO, has some promising statistics.

"The demand for fixed-wireless broadband grew 1,000% since last year," Pickle told those attending the second annual Broadband Wireless World Forum in March. He outlined the various access options: fiber, satellite, fixed wireless, DSL, cable and copper. Only 4% of office buildings are directly connected to fiber, so there's plenty of potential business out there for the other access techniques.

Rick Calder, Winstar executive vice president & chief marketing officer, also noted that in the small- and medium-size business enterprise — the market most wireless-broadband-service providers seek to serve — 60% of all companies now reach the Internet through dial-up. Another 20% do not have any Internet access at all.

"There has been an unusual confluence of events," Pickle said. They include competition, available spectrum, improved equipment and declining prices. Along with the thirst for high-speed data, they have moved the fixed-wireless industry forward.

The sheer number of attendees at the conference also told a tale, jumping from 731 in 1999 to more than 1,600 in 2000, with 35% of those from service providers. However, it's difficult to define a typical wireless-broadband-service provider. For example, Montana Power may not be a name that readily comes to mind, but Touch America, its subsidiary and an LMDS license holder, is building one of the largest fiber-optic networks in the United States, expected to reach 26,000 miles by 2001.

Last-Mile Solution
Touch America uses broadband wireless as a last-mile solution to provide 2-way voice, data, Internet and LAN services. Mike Meldahl, Touch America president, said wireless broadband gives his company an advantage over the RBOCs. He cited speed to market, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and the ability to listen to customers and provide solutions.

"Now these sound like trite things, but we've said first of all that wireless is just part of the solution," Meldahl said. "The customer doesn't care if it's a wired link or a wireless link as long as you do what you've said you're going to do. Most of my customers said, 'I need this much bandwidth, I need four 9s reliability and new services. I want it next week; I don't want to wait 120 days for delivery.'"

Touch America has 24 LMDS licenses covering 30 cities. It launched its initial service in Billings, MT, in September 1999, offering full voice and data services to business and government customers on its LMDS WAN.

John Skoro, Nortel Networks marketing manager of broadband-wireless access, said Touch America is making a good vertical business out of serving schools and government buildings in cities such as Billings, Butte and Helena, MT, and Spokane, WA. Touch America uses Nortel's Reunion point-to-multi-pointequipment in its networks.

Touch America's Meldahl said a company doesn't need to be a full-service provider in order to succeed in today's market.

"Look at your business plan. What's your goal? How big do you want to be?" he asked. "The decision you have to make is: How economically can I provide the end product to the customer?" Meldahl said.

Moving to 2-Way MMDS
Nucentrix Broadband Networks, an MMDS service provider, has decided that packaged high-speed wireless access is the end product it wants to offer to its customer base: small- to medium-size businesses, SOHO, telecom-muters and other organizations.

Curtis Henderson, senior vice president & general counsel, said Nucentrix is a small provider serving third- and fourth-tier markets. Back in the days when MMDS was a 1-way technology, Nucentrix used it to provide wireless-cable television. When the FCC approved the use of MMDS spectrum for 2-way Internet in 1998, Nucentrix already was experimenting with that capability. Today it controls 200MHz of MMDS spectrum, which passes 7.2 million line-of-sight households in 87 markets, as well as 20MHz of wireless communications services (WCS) spectrum (2.3GHz) in 19 markets. Its services include Internet access, e-mail, news groups, and Web design and hosting along with 24x7 network monitoring and technical support. It will be moving into the residential market eventually and also has plans to offer voice at some point.

Nucentrix is certified as the first Cisco Systems-powered network to offer wireless-broadband services. Last month, Nucentrix and Cisco conducted a field trial in Austin, TX, offering wireless-broadband access through Cisco's Vector Orthagonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VOFDM) solution. Because MMDS is not a line-of-sight technology, signals are able to bounce off of objects in the communications path; VOFDM reorders the multipath MMDS signals so that they appear to the receiver to arrive in a consistent stream from one location.

IP-Service Provider
Advanced Radio Telecom (ART) is using the 38MHz spectrum to provide wireless-broadband access. ART calls itself an IP-service provider serving ISPs, IXCs, on-site-service providers and application-service providers. ART currently owns and operates broadband wireless metropolitan-area networks in Phoenix; Portland, OR; San Jose, CA; and Seattle, and plans a total of 40 high-speed, 100Mb/s networks in the next few years.

Robert McCambridge, ART president & COO, said an IP platform is the future for broadband access.

"Over the next few years, you're going to see an access environment with the blurring of lines of voice, data and multimedia," McCambridge said, adding that IP is the best platform for all three with opportunities for service and applications. He also believes there is clearly a market for virtual private networks.

"High-end users are not going to want to put their really sensitive data on a shared network across the Internet," he said.

Although ART is almost entirely focused on point-to-point architecture today, or more specifically point-to-consecutive-point, McCambridge also sees a use for point-to-multipoint technology. ART uses Triton radios to create high-speed metro ring architectures, similar to fiber SONET rings.

"Then from these peripheral rings, there is an opportunity to reach these smaller buildings through the point-to-multi-point," he said. Integrate that with fiber, and it all starts to come together. "I don't think any service company can bet their company on a single technology," McCambridge said.

CenturyTel seems to agree. It also uses Triton equipment for its LMDS operations and is starting to use point-to-consecutive-point architecture. (It has one ring that has two legs in LMDS and a third in fiber.)

A LEC since 1930 when it started as a mom & pop local telephone operation, CenturyTel also offers long distance, mobile wireless, Internet and security monitoring in 20 states to more than 2 million customers.

"Essentially the markets we serve are in second- and third-tier cities and rural areas," said Eric Jackson,CenturyTel manager of emerging technologies. There are 125,000 businesses in CenturyTel's market, and only about half have more than five employees per business, he said.

"Given that market space, we are seeking the types of services that will give these businesses an opportunity to grow and for us to grow with them," he said.

Currently CenturyTel is constructing a fiber ring in Michigan that will link about ten cities and 24 cell sites, according to Doug Bieniek, general manager of broadband services. The original intent of the ring, which will be extended to Chicago, was to carry CenturyTel traffic and then resell any excess capacity.

"We picked up our LMDS licenses during the auction to overlay the markets where we had brand recognition," Bieniek said. This allows CenturyTel to extend its fiber to the customer premises and bypass the LEC. Other fiber-service providers without LMDS licenses will have to come through CenturyTel to do the same thing.

CenturyTel now believes there is a market for a new kind of service; it can use LMDS to offer 10BaseT and 100BaseT services. By next year, it plans to bump this up to OC12 or gigabit Ethernet.

Large-Scale Deployments
The clearest indication of wireless broadband's growth is recent news by some of the larger service providers.

After extensive testing, Nextlink announced in March that Nortel Networks is its initial choice for LMDS equipment. Nextlink will use the Reunion ATM-based, point-to-multipoint FDMA and TDMA solution as well as Nortel point-to-point radios.

Nortel Network's Skoro said that although his company wasn't on the earlier-announced list of vendors Nextlink was testing, Nortel had an advantage because it has a "road-hardened" product and offers both the frequency division multiple access (FDMA) and TDMA technology.

"Our philosophy is that we believe in FDMA, because we believe there is an efficiency for a larger aggregation of bandwidth," Skoro said. Nortel also believes in TDMA for oversubscription and smaller bursty types of data customers.

Nextlink will launch broadband-wireless networks in 25 markets by year-end. It will work with Nortel Networks to expand the use of broadband wireless in a wide-area, IP, end-to-end network between several major metropolitan areas, a step in creating a virtual Ethernet network.

MCI WorldCom has announced several MMDS equipment vendors and a series of trials. In early March, Hybrid got the nod to supply its S2000 wireless-broadband-access system for trials in Baton Rouge, LA; Jackson, MS; and Memphis. WarpOne service offers business customers Internet and Web-hosting services with scaleable bandwidth at DSL-like speeds. Warp 310 offers residential customers connectivity at 310kb/s.

In Boston, MCI WorldCom will work with ADC Telecommunications to offer MMDS technology with ADC's Axity products. Dallas is its fifth test market, where it will use the end-to-end MMDS solution developed by Cisco and Motorola.

As its merger with Sprint moves toward resolution in the second half of this year, MCI WorldCom has noted that the combined companies will offer broadband-fixed wireless to customers in more than 100 cities and will facilitate service to rural and other underserved areas. For now, Sprint's MMDS trials are independent of MCI WorldCom's, said Joe Paluska, MCI WorldCom spokesperson.

Even AT&T's Project Angel is back in the news. In March AT&T Digital Broadband began offering Fort Worth, TX, residential customers high-speed Internet access and both local and long-distance voice, all on one bill, through what AT&T is calling the nation's first wireless local communications company. The wireless connection uses 1.9GHz PCS spectrum; however, in some areas AT&T will use WCS spectrum, according to Ritch Blaasi, AT&T spokesperson. The signals are transmitted between a base station and a small antenna placed on the exterior of a customer's home, connected to a control unit inside. Up to four phone lines are possible, and families can connect up to five PCs in a LAN. The system was designed by AT&T with equipment from a variety of vendors, although AT&T is naming none of them, Blaasi said.

QoS for Success
Despite all of the recent announcements, wireless broadband still has challenges. The audience at the Broadband Wireless World Forum, polled during the opening session, said that LMDS deployment was behind schedule because of a general lack of equipment and the high cost of customer-premises equipment. More than half said standards, still under development, would be extremely important to the industry. The most important factor for success? Quality of service. The audience also predicted that in the next three years, the largest deployment of fixed wireless broadband would be in North America.

Teligent's Pickle opened the forum by saying that last year's long-term predictions had all come true in one year. He then came up with a prediction for 2020: "Eighty percent of the broadband needs of the world will be met by fixed wireless."