COMPTEL: Indiana Fiber Works signs on with GigaBeam

Indiana Fiber Works, a dark-fiber access provider in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, has teamed up with GigaBeam and will purchase 12 of its WiFiber wireless systems from that company to deliver Gigabit services over wireless access and backhaul links. This marks GigaBeam’s first announced CLEC customer.

GigaBeam radios provide commercial point-to-point links in the 71-76 GigaHertz and 81-86 GHz radio spectrum bands, known as the E band, which allows bandwidth up to one Gigabit per second to be provided over relatively inexpensive licensed radio links using standard Gigabit Ethernet.

The company has a wide range of radio patents for its technology, which uses low-cost, flat-plane antennas to deliver “pencil beams” of wireless access, enabling reuse of the spectrum every 50 feet. The radio signals also penetrate 80% of commercial glass, eliminating the need for roof rights in many cases, said John Krzywicki, vice president of marketing and strategy for GigaBeam.

For IFW, that makes the technology good for extending the reach of fiber loops into buildings, said Joe Sharkey, IFW’s General Manager.

“We see many opportunities where we can use GigaBeam’s WiFiber to extend the reach of our existing fiber network,” he said in a prepared statement released at the Comptel Fall Show in Orlando. “With WiFiber, we can now rapidly deploy a low cost high speed access solution for customers which will increase the utilization of our existing fiber optic network. This new technology will enable us to improve the return on capital already invested in our fiber network.”

GigaBeam is targeting “all carriers, all large enterprises and all government entities” with its system, Krzywicki said.

“We have gobs of spectrum that is licensed and cheap, and effectively available anywhere,” he said. “As a last mile technology for CLECs, for celltower backhaul and for colleges, financial services companies and high-tech companies, this is ideal.”

For fiber-based CLECs, the wireless system will enable them to connect more facilities to their network and drive up traffic on the fiber, he added. GigaBeam is particularly targeting municipal WiFi networks and WiMAX entries, Krzywicki added, as growing interest in delivering ubiquitous broadband creates greater opportunity there. The company provides a backbone network for WiFi in San Francisco, at Dartmouth and at other locations currently.

“This is a good high bandwidth, high availability alternative to fiber,” he said.

Licenses are available through a national coordination database, Krzywicki explained, and the cost is relatively cheap. A blanket national license costs $700 and individual circuits cost $300. The use of pencil beams or wireless cones makes it likely that there will be spectrum available where it’s needed, he added.