WorldCom launches more wireless-broadband markets

WorldCom’s (www.worldcom.com)Broadband Solutions group is bucking some recent trends by continuing to launch fixed-wireless Internet services.

As he launched service in Kansas City on Friday, Joe Brooks, vice president of sales market development, assured Wireless Review that WorldCom won’t be emulating AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com). AT&T Wireless launched its Project Angel service in Kansas City on Aug. 9 only to pull the plug on all its fixed-wireless services at the end of October.

“We’re not going to do that,” Brooks said.

Last week, WorldCom launches took place in Minneapolis, MN; Kansas City; and Montgomery, AL. This brings the launched markets to nine including Bakersfield, CA; Baton Rouge, LA; Jackson, MS; Chattanooga, TN, Memphis and Tallahassee, FL. Systems have been turned up in Pensacola, FL, and Lafayette, IN, and construction of systems is taking place in two additional markets. All 13 markets should be launched by year end, Brooks said.

All of these markets are using first-generation equipment provided by either Vyyo (www.vyyo.com) or Hybrid Networks (www.hybrid.com). In Kansas City, for example, WorldCom is using Vyyo line-of-sight equipment. It has constructed one cell site with a 35-mile radius and can reach about 70% of the small and medium-size enterprises (SME), Brooks said.

Once the 13 markets are up and running, WorldCom is likely to wait until second-generation, non-line-of-sight equipment is available before launching more markets, he said. In the meantime, serving the SME with first-generation equipment will sustain the business.

In this regard, WorldCom is different from Sprint (www.sprint.com), which announced recently that it, too, was going to wait for second-generation equipment before building additional markets with its MMDS service. Sprint laid off or reassigned many of the employees involved with the MMDS service and said that it would be adding no new customers in the markets it already was serving.

Sprint and WorldCom, however, have different business models with Sprint serving the residential market and WorldCom serving the SME.

From the time the Broadband Solutions group was formed in June 2000, WorldCom never has changed its business plan, Brooks pointed out.

“We’re very bullish on this technology,” he said.

Brooks said there is a bandwidth continuum. At the bottom is the consumer who is served with cable modems and ADSL. At the top is the large-enterprise customer, served with fiber, copper or fixed wireless. But the gap area is in the middle, the SME.

WorldCom is offering installation in just 72 hours and has three levels of service for its business customers ranging from 384kb/s to 1Mb/s downstream.

The carrier has MMDS licenses in 160 markets that range in size from New York City and Los Angeles to some that are very small. Brooks said WorldCom was pleased with the recent FCC decision to not reallocate MMDS spectrum to mobile 3G services as well as the new mobile allocation it added to the spectrum. He wasn’t prepared to discuss in any detail what this could mean to WorldCom in the long term. Portability? Perhaps. Mobility? Brooks said he couldn’t comment on that, adding he hadn’t been involved in any discussions on that issue.