BellSouth Corp. plans to expand the BellSouth Wireless Broadband Service into two new markets in its service territory by late October, to include select parts of Albany, Ga. and Paducah, Ky. The WiMAX-based service will soon be expanded in the New Orleans area to include New Orleans East.
The expansions will bring BellSouth's service footprint to 10 Southeastern markets, including four markets recently launched in September:
North Charleston, S.C.; Melbourne, Fla.; Greenville, Miss.; and Chattanooga, Tenn. The RBOC also offers wireless broadband service in Athens, Ga.; Palatka, Fla.; DeLand, Fla. BellSouth plans to expand the service to additional cities throughout 2006.
BellSouth's wireless broadband service offers residential and business customers fixed high-speed Internet access, with downstream speeds up to 1.5mbps. The system transmits signals between local radio towers and a small non-line-of-sight desktop subscriber modem and utilizes BellSouth licensed WCS 2.3GHz spectrum.
"With BellSouth Wireless Broadband Service, we can reach even more of our customers with high-speed Internet access," said Randy Roberts, vice president of wireless and CPE management at BellSouth. "One of our primary focuses in these latest deployments has been on our rural customers, some whose only opportunity to experience high-speed Internet is with our wireless broadband service."
Customers have the option to use the service at a discount as backup access to the Internet in the event of a wireline network outage. Customers can also choose to bundle a Wi-fi service.
BellSouth Corp. www.bellsouth.net/wirelessbb
