No Place Like Home

Providers are jumping on the fixed-wireless bandwagon to deliver plain (and not so plain) old telephone service to your home and mine.

Kevin Beebe, Alltel group president for the communications division, has a good name for it - wireline-alternative services. It means using wireless technology to offer voice and data services just as good, if not better, than wireline providers offer. It also can mean competing with and beating the wireline guys at their own game.

Although there has been much talk about using fixed wireless to serve small- and medium-size businesses, a huge market right now for some of the biggest providers is residential. Using spectrum that includes analog, 1.9GHz PCS, 2.3GHz WCS and 3.5GHz MMDS, providers are seeking out the best technology to provide a package of voice and high-speed Internet access, either now or in the near future, to both homes and businesses.

Recent launches by Sprint and AT&T help make the case. After using MMDS spectrum to launch wireless Internet service in Phoenix and Tucson, AZ, Evan Conway, Sprint assistant vice president of marketing and product development, said the company is "wildly happy" with the way the business has been progressing. The company counted some 5,000 customers within three months.

Sprint owns MMDS licenses covering 30% of the country in 90 markets. That gives the company a "fat pipe into your home with neat Internet apps on top of that and adding other items as available," Conway said. One of those other items is voice, something that Conway anticipates in 2001.

Meanwhile in the PCS/WCS spectrum, AT&T is offering both voice and data in the fixed-wireless environment.

"The business opportunity for us is the $100 billion local market that includes the high-speed data as well as voice," said Michael Keith, AT&T Wireless Broadband president & CEO. Launched the last week of March in Dallas, the service gained 4,500 customers in the first 3« months of operation. San Diego was the second launch, and launches in Los Angeles, Houston and Anchorage, AK, will take place by the end of this year.

First Applications A pioneer in the use of fixed wireless for voice is Western Wireless. Several years ago, the Antelope Valley in Nevada had no phone service at all; it would have been too expensive for Nevada Bell to build out the system or for the residents to foot the capital costs for doing so.

"We worked a deal with the Nevada PSC and Nevada Bell where we provided the service, Nevada Bell paid us, and Bell started receiving (Universal Service) subsidies based on subscribers," Mikal Thomsen, Western Wireless president & COO, explained.

That was the service provider's first experience with the subsidy process. Western Wireless realized it could use fixed wireless to provide service in rural areas at a much lower cost than the telephone companies could provide wireline services, provided that it, too, could be eligible for subsidies.

"It was an opportunity to go in and help everybody," Thomsen said. "Consumers could go out and do some comparison shopping and get the advantages of competition."

It wasn't as easy as it sounded, however. The challenge was getting certified as an Eligible Telecommunications Provider (ETC) in the states where Western Wireless was doing business. In May, Kansas and Minnesota were the first to grant ETC status to Western Wireless. The provider, in turn, began launching local phone service at $14.99 a month to more than 40 towns in Minnesota and 15 in Kansas, expanding the local calling areas to better compete with the ILECs. High-speed data will follow the voice service. Thomsen noted that customers are using the Western Wireless system even now to access the Internet at very slow speeds.

"When we can come in with higher-speed data products in these small towns, it will be a spectacular move up for a lot of (the customers)," he said.

Alltel Trials With Airspan For the past 12 to 18 months, Alltel has been working on its own fixed-wireless solution for voice and high-speed data, using the PCS spectrum and CDMA. Alltel has PCS licenses covering 31.7 million POPs and may look at obtaining more. Just two of its PCS markets are built out: Birmingham, AL, and Jacksonville, FL, each with 1.3 million POPs.

Technology trials with Airspan equipment are under way now, and the company hopes to make a decision on rolling out service by the end of the year, according to Beebe. Fixed-wireless technology will mean Alltel no longer must rely on the ILEC for access to residential customers or small businesses.

"If this works, the costs of deploying a second line to a residence in a wireless way is greatly below doing that in a wired way," Beebe said. "This is true where we are not an ILEC, and it is true where we are an ILEC. We'll look to deploy where it makes sense from a market perspective even where we are offering local phone service."

As far as technology is concerned, fixed wireless offers an advantage over mobile wireless in that a service provider can go with more than one solution. What makes sense in today's launch may be less than cutting-edge next year during future launches. Service providers tend to keep an open mind when selecting vendors.

Ongoing Evaluations "We're evaluating a ton of different things," said Sprint's Conway. "There will be new innovations every day. MMDS is an exciting spot for many manufacturers."

Sprint is using Hybrid's MMDS solution, the S2000, for its initial launches. Sprint's first market, Phoenix, is Hybrid's 52 superscript nd market, according to Michael Greenbaum, Hybrid president. He said the system is delivering 1.2Mb/s on average to Sprint customers with burst speeds clocked around 8Mb/s. (See Figure 1.)

When the system was being built, Hybrid learned that Sprint wanted to put many more users on the system than anyone had before on a 2-way MMDS system.

"We went to sectorization (see sidebar on page 32), putting 10 sectors around the city of Phoenix with a center on South Mountain," Greenbaum said.

Then when topography was blocking radio transmission in the Scottsdale area, Hybrid went to cellularization, placing a second transmitter on Shore Butte.

Each transmitter site covers a 35-mile radius. Because the customers have directional antennas, engineers can ensure that they won't generate signals to the wrong site.

Greenbaum said Hybrid's system has two critical components: the head-end and the customer-premises equipment (CPE). Intelligence at the head-end can control a whole city of CPE, all working in unison. It interfaces with the standard connections so you can connect through the telephone line or Ethernet. On the back end, it connects to the IP network or another service provider's provisioning system, he said.

"Voice is something in the plan for 2001," Greenbaum said. "We're delaying that because we're an IP-routed architecture, and some of the characteristics of voice over IP are not acceptable to use."

He also noted that CPE costs are going down along with size. In Hybrid's next-generation product, intelligence will go into a single chip rather than a board.

"Earlier, people thought DSL was going to be the answer to broadband access," Greenbaum said. "Now it turns out there are natural barriers."

If you are more than 18,000 feet from the office or have coils in the lines, speed is decreased, he said.

"Telephone companies that thought they could serve two thirds or three fourths of their customers with DSL are finding out they only can serve a third or a fourth," he added. "Cable people find they can't serve the small- and medium-enterprise markets because cable doesn't pass them."

Serving Different Market WorldCom also is using Hy-brid's solution to serve its residential and business customers in Baton Rouge, LA; Jackson, MS; and Memphis, TN. However, unlike Sprint, WorldCom has decided to focus primarily on business customers with its MMDS services, according to Joe Paluska, WorldCom spokesperson.

"The (MMDS) technology is more appropriate for small to medium business units," he said.

Despite the fact - hyped during the merger talks - that Sprint and WorldCom between them have a big chunk of the U.S. MMDS spectrum, Paluska noted, "We weren't working together before, and we aren't now."

WorldCom is testing ADC equipment in Boston and Cisco equipment in Dallas, and is looking at vendors such as Nortel and Lucent, he said.

"There's no commitment to a single vendor yet," Paluska pointed out. "They're all top-notch companies. We're trying to push our vendors to provide carrier-grade service over an emerging technology."

Looking for Speed Alltel chose to test Airspan's AS4000 fixed-wireless-access product because of its potential speed.

"We have not found any other manufacturer willing to talk about data transmission at the speed that Airspan has discussed with us," Beebe said. "We're doing a technology trial to make sure it works that way."

Chris Rogers, Airspan vice president of North American business, noted that Airspan did much of its technology development in the United Kingdom, and Europe endorsed the use of fixed wireless long before the United States. Now that the idea of voice and data on the same network, driven by the Internet, is in vogue here, Airspan has an IP-centric product with some maturity to it, he said.

"The voice-local-loop guys are trying to develop a data overlay," Rogers aid. "We started with both voice and data, so it's very easy for us to go from ISDN to IP-centric, which is attractive."

Airspan's technology will allow Alltel customers to have two voice lines and an always-on, high-speed Internet connection, and will support a full range of calling features. A small antenna at the customer's home is connected to a terminal box, which is connected to the existing telephone wires and telephones in the home. When a call is placed, the antenna transmits the signal over the PCS (CDMA) frequencies to a cellular tower and then to an Alltel switching center.

"We're shipping a 512kb/s burst rate into subscribers' PCs and will be shipping 1.5Mb/s in the April/May time frame," Rogers said. "It's wireless-DSL type of speed, which is shared all the way to the subscribers, rather than DSL, which is shared to the D-slam and then is dedicated to the subscriber in a shared environment."

He noted that PCS spectrum is relatively narrow compared with some of the other bands, so the system has to be more efficient.

"We end up having more sites to cover the same amount of area, most connected on a backhaul basis," Rogers said.

The advantage is that the mobility sites can be used, taking advantage of existing backhaul, buildings and leases.

Airspan also has an MMDS product and is active with MMDS operators. An advantage of building in Europe is that each country is different, so Airspan has as few frequency-dependent components as possible.

"We do the frequency conversion just before it hits the antenna, so we basically have the same CPE all over the world, and the antenna is the only frequency-dependent component," Rogers said.

AT&T's Angel Using both PCS and WCS frequencies, AT&T Wireless has developed its own patented fixed-wireless digital-broadband technology known as Project Angel. (See Figure 2 on page 36.) It has been temporarily licensed to Motorola, which will provide the technology to service providers outside the United States.

In the United States, AT&T's service should be available to 15 million homes by the end of 2002. Customers can receive up to four voice lines; custom-calling features; always-on Internet connectivity (up to 512kb/s now and 1Mb/s by year-end); and LAN connectivity of up to five PCs using the Web simultaneously.

AT&T's proprietary air-interface technology with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing allows high spectral efficiency and multipath resistance. It uses 10MHz of spectrum broken into 5MHz blocks, the upper used for base-station transmission and the lower for remote-unit transmission. The 5MHz band is divided into four sub-bands of 1MHz each, used in a cellular architecture where each cell comprises four sectors and one sub-band is used in each sector. (See Figure 3.)

The point-to-multipoint technology does not require line of sight.

"You rent space on towers and draw a circle a mile wide (encompassing) three to four thousand homes, and sell to all in the area," AT&T's Keith said.

Analog & 3G, Too In the rural areas of Kansas and Minnesota, analog cellular is the key to fixed-wireless service. As far as technology is concerned, "We're basically stealing everybody else's technology that we can," Western Wireless' Thomsen joked.

"Telular produces a black box that you can plug your telephone system into," he said.

It's placed on the wall, and because it's a 3W unit, it works in most areas. If a customer is within 10 to 12 miles of the cell, service should be good. Line of sight clearly helps.

"In some cases, if you need to or want to, you can place a yagi antenna on the roof," Thomsen said. Telular also produces digital units, and Western Wireless plans to use these in the future, he said.

But Western Wireless' rural customers won't be left behind when it comes to high-speed data. The service provider is planning a rural fixed-wireless-access trial using 3G cdma2000 technology in conjunction with Nortel Networks. It will take place in Minnesota and South Dakota beginning the fourth quarter of this year.

"We'll be testing 1XRTT during the fourth quarter and then EDGE," Thomsen said. "We expect to deploy it at least in some markets by the end of next year and in most markets by 2002."

Sectorization is the key to frequency reuse in Sprint's Phoenix fixed-wireless system.

"What we do is use narrow-beam antennas of about 30 degrees," said Robert Furniss, Hybrid director of product line management. "Imagine that I use one frequency (A) in one sector and then another frequency (B) in the sectors adjacent to it. If I can use 10 sectors with half A and half B, I've halved the amount of bandwidth in the individual sectors and then multiplied by 10, so there is actually 5-times gain."

Because some of these sectors may be shooting out into the desert, there's not really a 5-times gain, he noted. Sometimes you can do things like use even narrower-beam antennas over the sectors to increase the sectorization; for example, 12-degree rather than 30-degree sectors.

"You just have to know that the antenna performance is good enough so you can reuse the frequency one sector over," Furniss said.

In Phoenix, 10 sectors are lit and two are not.

"That's where the jack rabbits are," Furniss said.