Patrick Leary and Steve Stroh gave an update on the state of wireless broadband (w-bb in my shorthand notes).
Patrick Leary
Talk about unlicensed wireless other than WiFi. Alvarion - Founded in 1992 as BreezeCOM. W-BB is great equalizer of BB tech. The one type of methodology than can be deployed by any entity, new and incumbent. Stats hard to find.
Last year $85m on unlicenses w-bb in US (not wifi). 1:15 ratio of base stations to CPE [consumer premises equipment]. About $6m on base stations, $79m on CPE. 30% growth pa.
Mix of 900Mhz, 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz. Lots of unlicensed spectrum. 2.4 declining fast, .9 and 5 faster, 5 biggest. Many adopters, not just WISPs [Wireless ISPs]. Often share rural component. Diverse, different motivations. WISPs early adopters. Hate the telcos. Foresaw WiFi commoditization.
About 200 US WISPs but most have <50 CPE (400-500 people). High expectation of dialtone, century of subsidized rural ops.
Utilities doing w-bb. Some states say cities can provide internet services (e.g. MO). Rural don’t have access to DSL, don’t want revenue sharing.
Rural cellular carriers. Whole existence on licensed bands. Beginning to adopt unlicensed. Lots of good customer and billing assets. Real estate.
Cablecos. Small segment.
Munis. Can’t wait for VZ or SBC. Losing businesses to adjacent towns.
Some examples: WLAN to connect nearby users, never ddesigned for outside of enterprise. W-BB designed from ground up for commercial service like SLA, QoS, etc.
Leaders in North America? AMA Techtel – grain storage. 53 years in small towns. Wireless on private network, and extend to local communities. About 6000 subs. Prices – similar to cable and DSL. Big network – near contiguous, 2 hour drive across. WTF [Where’s the Fiber]? Not here. Get re-deployable capacity, some NLOS connectivity.
Diode – Diller Telephone. Nebraska. 1888 founded! 500 access lines.
WTF? Joking! 9 households/sq mile – fiber untinkable.
Owensboro Muni Utilities. Community services. $25/month. Tight cell coverage. Utility wants ubiquitous access, so overbuild. Higher grade equipment. WTF? Yep. Lots. Connects power facilities. Not economic to home today.
Midwest wireless. Tier 2 cellular, about 350k subs. Needed separate brand. Clearwave, very successful. Fastest growing, eliminating churn. About 10% of state of MN covered. WTF? No way. Over 200 towers. Just stick radios on existing towers.
Wheatland Broadband. Electric membership coop. 40000 people in western KS. Very rural. Take rates as high as 35%. 56% of households with computers.
Back-haul wireless. WTF? 3 households/sq mile, no way.
Allegany County, MD. Have replaced every single Verizon leased line. Not a single entity left. Allconet phase 2 on the way. They are becoming carrier.
WTF? No way. Poster children for all W-BB.
San Diego County Sheriff’s Dept. Ultimate lasting virtue is mobility. Want to manage It productivity, getting more than 2 hours/officer/day improvement.
WTF? Not relevant, mobile.
WiMax – [presentation from WiMax forum] – today mostly hype. Non-certified product for 3.5Ghz (non-US; 3.5Ghz in military in US). Nothing certified now. First interop testing in Dec 04 at best. Chipsets mid ‘05. Unlicensed WiMax in 2006.
Case study. Community on coast of Newfoundland. Some communities don’t even have voice. Shared payphones. Populations declining with fisheries. No BB, communities die. Problems with access to health services, education, challenges from mountainous remote terrain, climate, ecology.
Solution was u/l w-bb. Some federal money. Health, education, biz. About 120km from end-to-end. WTF? Nope. Towers by helicopter. Solar panels to power. Expanding.
BB not about free, but about being an economic engine.
Steve Stroh
Excited about w-, grew up in small town. Internet would have been great when growing up. Only came with w-bb. Only later did DSL arrive. W- lets you route around the stupidity of a telco.
Verizon quote in Telephony – “rival BB means we won’t deploy BB” – [circular argument]
Virtual fiber starting to take hold. A chunk at 57-64Ghz. Radio equiv of flashlight in fog bank. Unlicensed. No modulation specified. Can run gigabit into a radio. As dirty and polluting as you like, as limited spillover.
Where they (smaller ISPs) have fiber in an urban core, they are running freespace optical out from the fiber core to buildings where they have customers but not fiber. Like a sprinkler head on a fiber hose. Suddenly all the buildings have access to competitive bandwidth.
Asterisk author did keynote talk at WISPCon in Chicago. Was telling WISPs how to build Asterisk systems. Capable of building and deploying infrastructure. Will not even build network just for voice. Quietly doing it, don’t want to be on radio. Pulver FWD decision means you can build your own intercom system. (Just don’t obviously interconnect with PSTN.)
VoD [Video on Demand] over fiber? Have been waiting for TiVo cum streamer. Akimbo now exists. Box sits on TV, order up movies.
“WiFi is generally not a great infrastructure unless you build it that way.” Disagree with that. Example in Thursday’s USA Today. Talks about city in CA. Tired of waiting for cable and DSL companies. Came up with provider called AirMesh. Cost of about $30k. Can have it ready in a couple of months. Box the size of a toaster oven, attach to power poles and street lights.
Patrick: We’ll see how they perform have customers. Will be like a pump well instead of getting water from stream. Not the end point.
WiFi is the standard every other w-bb solution must be measured against. Companies like Vivato getting there.
Q [Bob Frankston]: I go to Radio Shack and want to buy gear, what does it cost?
P: Currently market is expensive, average about $500 for true w-bb CPE. Can support 300 customers with $15k
Q: Backhaul: how to do it.
Some doing out of band point-to-point links. 8-10ms from point to point
Q: How do you get the best industry data?
It’s all mixed in with WiFi, so hard to separate the rest. Hard to extrapolate market. Struggle to get accurate market data.
Q: Political issues in one community. Ops in Russia, France, Africa. What differences do you see at customer end?
Huge differences in regulatory regimes. E.g. US regulators don’t just regulate size of channel bus also modulation. Political stability issues elsewhere, big country. 2.4Ghz licensed in Nigeria. Customer in Russia can use network as much for 3G cellular backhaul.
Q: Who pays for all this?
IPOs during bubble, which is why we have so much cash. Customer, ultimately.
Q: Who are your customers?
See socialtext page. Siemans, Alcatel OEM product. Major ILEC in Europe. Titan/Reliance in India. Lots in China.
Steve: Fiber is great BUT has to be there, competitive and reasonably priced. With wireless you have the choice whether to take the copper of fiber deal, or just bypass the whole lot. Example is WISP in suburbs outside Chicago. Tired of being raped on T1 deals from Ameritech. Found rooftop on outer edge in Chicago with fiber. Set up point to point link. 20km. Very competitive. When the time came cut over and said we don’t need T1, telco in shock.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 02:35 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Just a minor correction. I commented that the number of North American WISPs is likely about 2,000, not 200.
Otherwise good summary. Must be nice to type fast!
Thanks for your efforts Martin.
- Patrick Leary
Posted by: at April 7, 2004 12:03 PM