Broadband wireless — WiMAX in particular — is gaining great new momentum on numerous fronts. There’s just one catch: WiMAX equipment is not yet available.
The new non-line-of-sight, point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access technology known as WiMAX has great appeal because it will be based on standard chipsets rather than the proprietary, relatively expensive chipsets required for broadband wireless today.
The WiMAX Forum expects to begin certification and interoperability testing later this year and move toward the introduction of WiMAXCertified products in 2005.
A new study from BWCS and Senza-Fili Consulting indicates by 2009, the U.S. market for broadband wireless access services based on technologies such as WiMAX will be worth $3.7 billion and fixed wireless services will account for 3.6 percent of all broadband connections in the United States.
Meanwhile, In-Stat/MDR forecasts the broadband wireless access market will grow from $558.7 million last year to at least $1.2 billion by the end of 2007, thanks to WiMAX. “The need for and interest in [fixed wireless broadband] is already there,” says Daryl Schoolar, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR. “These emerging standards will merely give this market the extra boost that it has needed.”
And a recent survey sent to nearly 400 wireless ISPs worldwide by ABI Research reveals that more than half of the respondents, with an average of just 765 subscribers, intend to deploy WiMAX equipment as soon as possible to lower overall equipment costs, both for customer premises equipment (CPE) and for base stations.
The survey indicated respondents are also not afraid to go after incumbents. Over half mentioned their initial service launches are in areas served by two or more competing technologies. These trends are observed in the marketplace by companies like NextWeb Inc. in California and TowerStream on the East Coast. Both are successfully competing in markets served by cable, DSL and T1 access.
Why WiMAX?
“We see wireless broadband as an important access component to our portfolio of network and communications services,” said Aamir Hussain, Qwest’s director of broadband technologies, in announcing the company’s membership to the WiMAX Forum this spring. “We look forward to working with the WiMAX Forum to achieve standardized broadband wireless access solutions at a significantly lower price point than what is currently available today.”
For local incumbents like Qwest and BellSouth broadband wireless could provide another access method to serve customers that are out of reach for DSL. (Meanwhile, Alcatel, which is a major supplier of DSL equipment to the RBOCs, announced an OEM agreement with Navini through which Alcatel will market the Navini line as the Alcatel 7386 Wireless IP products.)
Of course, if WiMAX significantly decreases the cost of broadband wireless equipment, it will become a much more attractive access option for the RBOCs — and everyone else — for a variety of applications.
Today, proprietary broadband wireless offers competitive service providers like TowerStream a quick-to-market and highbandwidth solution for business customers. In the near future, WiMAX, which TowerStream plans to overlay onto its existing network, will allow the company to consider using a wider variety of vendors and realize lower equipment costs, particularly on the CPE end, says Philip Urso, the CEO of TowerStream, which was the first service provider on the WiMAX Forum. “Now CPE is pretty expensive,” Urso says, noting the cost is in the $750 range. When WiMAX chips get into mass production, that could bring chipsets down to into the pennies versus dollars range, he says, resulting in significant reductions in the price of premises-based equipment. Juan Santiago, director of strategy at equipment provider Motorola Canopy Wireless Broadband Products, says the biggest cost of broadband wireless is in the CPE, which is basically the antenna at the end-user location. Santiago says most vendors sell CPE for $500 and up, but Motorola’s product lists for $300. Santiago says the WiMAX vendors are targeting the $350 range for their initial pricing of CPE.
TowerStream’s Urso says that in addition to lower-priced equipment, WiMAX also promises to deliver quality-of-service (QoS) functionality, so that service providers can set traffic flows for different payloads, allowing voice to get top priority, for example.
“The real revolution is VoIP,” Urso adds. “We’re now using Vonage over our service with many, many of our customers — and they’re getting all services without any ILEC or any wires. With our WiMAX-enabled network, when it comes to fruition, many, many people will start to use VoIP.”
In further evidence of the intersection of broadband wireless and VoIP, service wholesaler Net2Phone in late April announced plans to offer IP telephony solutions to Navini’s wireless broadband customers.
Pre-WiMAX
Four-year-old TowerStream was around before WiMAX became popular. The company today operates a proprietary broadband wireless network based on Aperto Networks’ proprietary point-to-multipoint equipment, which Urso says has many WiMAX-like features. The network operates over a mix of licensed and unlicensed spectrum, mostly in the 5GHz band.
TowerStream — which delivers services in Boston; Chicago; Newport, Providence and Westerly, R.I.; and New York — serves hundreds of business customers with access options ranging from T1 to 100mbps, but it is capable of providing connections up to multiple gigabits. Among TowerStream’s services is “5 for 5,” which delivers 5mbps connectivity for $500 a month. “Customers are really amazed at that — that’s unheard of,” Urso says, adding that the first 1.5mbps is guaranteed QoS and the rest is best effort.
What’s more, Urso says, TowerStream can offer that very affordable, highly-reliable, big bandwidth without relying at all on local incumbent service providers. “Since we’re not beholden to the telco in any way, we can deliver this very quickly — with a 48-hour installation guaranteed,” he says.
Other companies offering comparable broadband wireless services in the United States include airBand Communications Inc., which offers services in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and Phoenix metropolitan areas; and NextWeb Inc., which offers access to more than 500,000 business locations throughout at least 120 cities in northern and southern California.
“TowerStream represents a breed that will probably revolutionize telecommunications in the whole country,” Urso says.
Despite all the recent excitement around broadband wireless, deployment of the technology is very limited. In fact, in recent years it has declined. According to market data from the FCC, between 2000 and mid-2003, the broadband wireless access share of the business market decreased from 0.99 percent to 0.32 percent.
The reason is until now, as Senza Fili Consulting’s Monica Paolini writes in a report, broadband wireless access “has failed to achieve widespread adoption due to a lack of standardization. As we have seen with Wi-Fi, standards help to drive down hardware costs and promote interoperability among manufacturers. This, in turn, enables operators to deliver attractive, userfriendly services.”
BellSouth’s Position
That hasn’t stopped BellSouth from testing broadband wireless, however. The RBOC, which has been testing Navini equipment for about a year, is probably the domestic incumbent most actively using broadband wireless.
BellSouth is testing the licensed, 2.3GHz proprietary broadband wireless technology in Daytona and rural Palatka, Fla.; has a joint trial running with rural organization America Connect in two rural North Carolina counties; and is readying a broadband wireless test in Atlanta, expected to launch shortly, Mel Levine, director of wireless broadband for the carrier, tells xchange.
The company sees broadband wireless as a potential filler technology for areas that can’t be reached with wireline DSL, says Levine, who refers to the Navini-enabled connectivity as “wireless DSL.” BellSouth has 75 percent DSL coverage in its region, he says, but because of DSL’s limited reach “it can’t go everywhere.”
In Palatka, the company also is testing broadband wireless as a backhaul method for three Wi-Fi access points at St. Johns River Community College. The Palatka trial, which launched this spring, will continue for up to six months and include local businesses, residences and educational institutions.
While the results of BellSouth’s broadband wireless trials have been encouraging, the company wants to better assess the financial viability of wireless broadband compared to wireline DSL and how the technology operates in different environments and topographies with respect to service availability and delivery, says Levine. “The Daytona trial was supposed to end at the end of 2003, but results were so promising, we expanded that into the Palatka trial,” says Levine, of the company’s Florida broadband wireless activities. “And we will also test it in a metro area — Atlanta — to see how it bounces off buildings; we’re in the planning stages for that.”
The RBOC predicts broadband wireless equipment and maintenance costs to be similar to or lower than that of traditional DSL, Levine says.
“In 2000, we were testing first-gen wireless broadband from ADC [Communications Inc.]. It was a one-way broadband technology using dialup to go upstream and broadband downstream,” says Levine. “We were just trying to understand the technology. Then the economics did not play out for us: truck rolls, the cost of base stations and the cost of the CPE. Also, it was lineof- sight equipment, so every [installation] required a truck roll and antenna on the home.”
Navini calls its technology a “zero-install solution” and says its products deliver a total cost of ownership up to 50 percent less than DSL or cable, and up to 70 percent lower than firstgeneration wireless broadband. BellSouth would not provide xchange with the current or projected dollar figures for its broadband wireless equipment or maintenance.
