LMDS: A License to Drive

Think back (far, far back, if necessary) to when you first got your driver's license. The preparation, the test, the promise of increased latitude. And you certainly knew what you wanted to do with that scrap of paper and a bad photograph, didn't you? You wanted a car. You wanted to drive places unsupervised. (You also knew what you didn't want to do. Who else discovered they'd become their younger siblings' chauffeur service?)

Did you need some car manufacturer, auto parts store, mechanic or your parents to tell you how to put that license to work? Of course not. You knew best how to fulfill your plans. Everything else was mere guidance.

Now follow me to the regulatory birth of LMDS: Wednesday, March 25, 1998 -- the conclusion of the FCC's 17th auction, when 104 bidders went home with their new licenses and an industry's hopes for what milli-meter-wave signals in the 28GHz spectrum could deliver.

Then an interesting phenomenon took hold. Except for one notable exception, a silence fell over the LMDS spectrum winners. It was almost as if they were waiting for the industry to tell them what to do with those licenses!

Sure, you've heard a great deal about the promise of LMDS in recent months. That's due in part to WinStar, the New York-based owner of 15 licenses, whose chairman & CEO, William Rouhana, glows not only as spokesperson for his company but for the concept of wireless-facilitated competition in the local loop.

Identify the other vocal proponents of LMDS, and you'll be convinced that vendors are writing the business plans for this developing segment: ADC with its CellSpan broadband wireless platform; Bosch and Cisco with their broadband wireless networking solutions; Nortel's Reunion broadband wireless access portfolio; and Lucent with its new Wireless Broadband Networks Division (the result of an acquisition of Hewlett-Packard's LMDS Wireless Business).

Vendors are defining how tomorrow's wireless service provider can transmit information -- voice, data and video -- at rates equal to fiber optics, on networks as reliable as fiber. One only can imagine that LMDS carriers like WNP Communications, ALTA Wireless and CoServ are spending their days overwhelmed by sales calls at which vendors are teaching them what can be done with their undervalued allocations of airwaves.

Is there anything wrong with this picture? Not necessarily. The technology's inventor best defines its applications. But it does give you pause about who controls the direction that a new industry takes: the service providers or the manufacturers that supply them?

Wireless communications have, until now, been unusually grassroots-driven. Back in 1983, although customers may not have known what to expect from a "cellular radiophone," they knew they wanted communications mobility. The carrier went in search of the means to fulfill this expectation. The vendor supplied the means. This system in reverse has stumbled (a collection of PDAs, some hard-to-place enhanced services, CDPD -- all, in hindsight, more vendor-experimental than user-fulfilling). This is a historic moment in an increasingly complicated wireless industry.

I suppose that, as with that driver's license, what matters is that we get to where we need to be. How we do it is merely details.