Wireless veteran back in First Mile

R. Stanley Allen has been around wireless communications for a long time. The Atlanta resident founded or co-founded MMDS company American Quality Cable, and BLEC Cypress Communications and is a former director of Wireless Cable of Atlanta and the Wireless Communications Association International. He was a consultant to First Avenue when it purchased the wireless assets one-time wireless access pioneer Teligent.

Allen is now president of First Mile Technologies, a company that looks to leverage fixed wireless technologies for wholesale access to competitive carriers in Atlanta. And he sees a very different market from the one in which Teligent, WinStar and Advanced Radio Technologies once competed – and failed. Allen believes fixed wireless access will soon enjoy a major resurgence in the local market.

“Obviously those companies were way ahead of themselves in terms of deploying equipment and infrastructure before they had a customer base and in paying landlords a lot of money for rooftop access before they had a customer base,” said Allen. “But things are very different now. The technology has improved significantly – gigabit and above connections are possible which weren’t a possibility then. The equipment has improved and matured to make high-speed connections financially feasible.”

In addition, he said, the end of UNE-P rules which required the Bell companies to resell local access loops at prices set by regulators has changed the competitive landscape to make alternative access more attractive.

“With everything going on on the regulatory side and on the merger and acquisition side, CLECs and other carriers were having more and more difficulty working with [Bell companies],” he said. “With consolidation, there are fewer alternatives for carriers. A year ago, AT&T and MCI had fiber access for sale, now they are owned by [Bell companies] who historically haven’t dealt well with CLECs.”

With the elimination of competitors, prices are firming up and access to fiber could even become problematic, Allen said.

His company is working with Southern Telecom to provide alternative wholesale access in Atlanta using First Mile’s wireless assets and Southern Telecom’s fiber network.

“Southern Telecom polled their customers on who would be interested in broadband wireless in the last mile,” Allen said. “They almost universally responded that they would be interested.”

Having lived through the previous rounds of wireless hype, Allen is also avoiding any overblown projections. His company is deliberately keeping a narrow focus and providing wholesale transport only, not services.

“We will partner with service providers like ISPs,” he said. “But we are very narrowly focused on securing roof rights, and providing the wireless infrastructure.”

First Mile has two sources of spectrum – the company is filing point-to-point applications with the Federal Communications Commission at a number of different spots on the available spectrum and it is working with First Avenue on a wholesale agreement at the 24 GigaHertz and 39 GigaHertz bands.

“At this point, we are only operating in Atlanta” Allen said. “We do have some proposals out to Atlanta-based companies who have offices in other markets and have asked us to look into providing services in other markets.”