Southern Telecom, First Mile team on Atlanta wireless

Wholesale infrastructure provider Southern Telecom is teaming up with wireless operator First Mile Communications to bring new wireless broadband services to businesses in Atlanta.

The two companies are turning up their first broadband wireless hub today at Atlanta’s INFORUM, offering broadband wireless connections to about 5600 businesses in 1500 office buildings within a five-mile radius of the INFORUM, or essentially covering most of downtown Atlanta.

The services will use Southern Telecom’s fiber facilities which already are deployed throughout metropolitan Atlanta. Southern Telecom provides wholesale fiber infrastructure to a variety of competitive service providers including Cogent Communications, Level 3 Communications, AT&T and Verizon Business.

The companies are calling the new service offering Wireless Lateral, and will be adding another hub location in Atlanta at the Georgia Power building, according to Ben Easterling, manager of business development for Southern Telecom.

“This is extending our fiber optic network wirelessly,” he said. “Our model is offer those tenants a low cost high bandwidth solution using wireless, and then, as the bandwidth at that building grows, we can migrate to a fiber connection.”

The wireless service, which will also be predominantly a wholesale offering, is being engineered to offer five-nines reliability, Easterling said. Services are offered over licensed bandwidth in the 18 GigaHertz, 24 GHz and 38 GHz bands.

“The primary market we are seeing initially is for redundancy,” he said. “Customers have primary fiber connection from the incumbent or another carrier but because of Sarbannes-Oxley and post-911 concerns, they want a redundant connection.”

Southern Telecom operates a 1400-route mile fiber optic network, selling dark fiber and a full suite of infrastructure services that leverage the extensive rights of way of its parent company, Southern Power. It also operates metro networks in Macon, Georgia; Jacksonville, Fla.; and the Alabama cities of Birmingham and Montgomery.

“We do plan to take it into other metro areas,” Easterling said. “As the market grows and the understanding of what we are doing in Atlanta grows, we will expand the Wireless Lateral offering.”