PCS licensees opting for fixed wireless

AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) may be rejecting fixed-wireless service. Sprint (www.sprint.com) may be delaying it. But some smaller PCS license holders see it as a means of salvation. Not only does it offer potential revenue, but also it's a way to meet build-out requirements for their licenses.

Airspan Networks (www.airspan.com), which supplies the AS2000, a wireless DSL solution using the PCS spectrum, said this past summer that it was making a concerted effort to target these smaller U.S. carriers. (See “Build It or Lose It,” Wireless Review, Aug. 15, 2001.) In September, alone, it signed up eight of them as customers.

Dave Reeder, Airspan vice president of sales for North America, said some of the carriers were in a real hurry. A few needed a 2-week turnaround, so Airspan initially put in fairly minimal configurations with an eye to increasing capacity later.

“We’ve had a customer or two say, ‘I don’t want to even talk about expanding the system right now. I only want to cover my license. Just get the service turned up and then we can discuss what the upgrade path is,’” Reeder said.

Others already see the value in deploying DSL-like services. Greg Killpack, Emery Telecom (www.etv.net) general manager, was waiting for his equipment to arrive when he spoke with Wireless Review.

“We think it’s a great technology because of the two voice circuits and the data circuit,” he said. It’s difficult to make a mobile PCS plan work where Emery is located, in rural central Utah. An ILEC, Emery has 17,400 LEC customers spread over 8,800 square miles. Towns tend to be about 1,500 to 2,500 people and about ten miles apart. In fact the only dense area is a town of 10,000. As a result, it’s too expensive to deploy mobile services. Competition consists of Verizon Wireless (www.verizonwireless.com) and Western Wireless (www.westernwireless.com), which are offering lower rates than Emery can consider.

But Emery has PCS spectrum and doesn’t want to lose it.

“There will be technology coming down the pike that will be delivered via wireless,” Killpack said. He also is in the midst of deploying wireline DSL. The wireless solution fits well, because of the limitations on mileage with the wireline product.

For example, a lot of gas exploration takes place outside city limits in Emery’s territory. Offices are located in remote areas. “It’s cost prohibitive to plow seven or eight miles of copper out there to a customer you’re not sure will be around after three or four years,” Killpack said.

His buildout deadline for the PCS spectrum is in June 2002. When he read about the wireless solution to his dilemma, Killpack checked into it immediately and thought it was “too good to be true.” He plans to have the system operating by the end of the year.

At Chariton Valley Communications (www.cvalley.net) in Missouri, General Manager Bill Biere currently is deploying one base station with Airspan equipment for high-speed Internet service. It should be up and running in about a month.

Biere said he is most interested in the data aspects of the product for now. He also offers mobile service and said that the buildout deadline — although he does face one — is not his primary reason for deploying wireless DSL.

“It appears that there is a pretty good market demand for it, and we think we’ll have a pretty good service out of it,” he said.

The first base station will be a trial system to work out any issues before adding more base stations, Biere said.

Other carriers deploying Airspan’s system include Triad Holdings of California, Tern Wireless of Pennsylvania and TriCo Wireless (www.tricowireless.com) of Florida. The AS4000 is operating now in 10 states, and Reeder anticipates more customers. He is working with a company that's determining which licenses are expiring.

“Over 1,200 PCS licenses are scheduled to expire in April,” Reeder said. Some have been built out, but quite a few others have not. With the current state of the industry, Reeder said he’s seeing very select markets or only portions of markets being upgraded, much different from a year or two ago when full network deployment was more usual.

“One of the advantages of wireless is the stepped infrastructure investment,” Reeder said. “You don’t have to pass all the homes or bury all the cable before you turn up your first customers.”