Wireless Fixations

Service providers focus on point-to-multipoint rollouts

by Kate Gerwig

When Nextlink Communications Inc. (McLean, VA) lays fiber in historic downtown Boston, it is required to number the cobblestones so they are put back in the same order. Preservation is only one of the limiting factors for service providers that want to reach customers with high-speed Internet services. The time and money needed to bring fiber to the desktop has also curtailed the service providers' ability to make widespread broadband rollouts. But using fixed wireless technology to skip fiber and copper altogether could soon become a reality, as a variety of service providers test the technology's scalability with an eye toward deployments this year and next. As with any new technology, however, instant success is far from guaranteed.

While copper is nearly ubiquitous after a century of deployment, its ability to support high-speed service is limited over distance. Coaxial cable largely reaches residences, not businesses. Unfortunately, fiber optic cable reaches only about 5 percent of the estimated 750,000 office buildings in the United States, according to International Data Corp. (IDC, Framingham, Mass.), leaving a huge number of potential customers for wireless broadband services. Several providers, therefore, hope broadband fixed wireless services will enable them to offer high-speed Internet access without laying fiber to office and apartment buildings and individual homes.

"Fixed wireless is a useful addition to a carrier's technology tool bag," says Mark Zohar, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.). "Wireless broadband technology has a long way to go to prove itself but promises to offer certain advantages, like time to market, especially in areas outside the urban core."

Companies including MCI WorldCom Inc., Sprint Corp., AT&T, Teligent Inc. (Vienna, Va.), WinStar Communications Inc. (New York) and Nextlink are all in fixed wireless deployment and trial mode, with major rollouts scheduled to continue through 2001 (see "Fixed Assets") if the business model proves competitive.

Providers with different bands of spectrum have been deploying point-to-point wireless systems for a few years, but they're now adding point-to-multipoint systems to reach more users efficiently. The plan is for fixed wireless services to become a third alternative -- along with digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modems -- for broadband access to the Internet. But even if fixed wireless can be viewed as a cheap alternative to traditional terrestrial networks, it still poses a few challenges. For one thing, service providers have yet to figure out how to market it.

"I don't think fixed wireless is even in the public awareness yet. If you read about broadband, you'll see articles about DSL and cable modems, but you're just beginning to hear about fixed wireless," says Tim Sutton, president of the Sprint Broadband Wireless Group. In addition, fixed wireless is subject to some technical limitations, such as the requirement that signals have a clear line-of-sight path for travel between the base station and the rooftop antenna. Weather affects wireless signals, too, with rain and snow sometimes causing static, dropped calls and bad connections.

WinStar senior vice president of network and customer operations, Kevin Lombardo, agrees that providers initially didn't engineer fixed wireless properly because they weren't sure how to deploy it as a commercial technology. Lombardo maintains that fixed wireless can be highly reliable. Eventually, effective use of point-to-multipoint fixed wireless could prompt WinStar, which concentrates on the business market, to enter the residential market because the technology is cheap to deploy and can light massive numbers of buildings in one shot.

Right now, the providers interested in fixed wireless are concentrating on either the consumer or business markets for trying point-to-multipoint services, with MCI WorldCom, Sprint and AT&T looking more at adding residence customers and Teligent, WinStar and Nextlink eyeing smaller office buildings.

Both Sprint and MCI WorldCom have been aggregating multichannel multipoint distribution service (MMDS) spectrum, formerly designated for distance learning and wireless cable television services. The ability for an MMDS signal to reach up to 35 miles makes it possible to target smaller cities and rural areas that will never see DSL deployment, says Kerry McKelvey, vice president of marketing for MCI WorldCom Wireless Solutions. MCI WorldCom is looking at fixed wireless as a service it can offer effectively after its planned merger with Sprint. Together, the combined company would have enough spectrum to cover about two-thirds of the country with fixed wireless services, reaching 54 million homes in second- and third-tier cities.

Despite its relatively long reach compared with other frequencies, MMDS spectrum comes with its own challenges, including an obligation to work with educational facilities around the country to provide them with learning services. That means MCI WorldCom has to negotiate with individual schools on how to serve them, as well as its residential customers, says Jonathan Mapes, chief technology officer of MCI WorldCom Wireless Solutions. Even so, Mapes believes MCI WorldCom can deploy fixed wireless broadband services before DSL and cable modem service will reach customers outside major metropolitan areas.

To push deployment of fixed wireless service, MCI WorldCom will hold three fixed wireless trials in Memphis, Tenn., Jackson, Miss., and Baton Rouge, La., this summer. The company will test several types of service bundles and price points to determine its acceptance among residential and small-business customers. MCI WorldCom's McKelvey says a consumer service probably will be priced at about $40 a month, while a symmetrical business service would be $300 to $600.

Sprint is already testing two-way fixed wireless services in Phoenix, Detroit and San Francisco. Sutton says Sprint doesn't need access to building wiring to deploy MMDS, which makes it easier because customers only need to place a 10-inch antenna on their premises. Sutton says an asymmetrical service will most likely include 2 Mbit/s downstream, with 256 kbit/s on the upstream for consumers and 512 kbit/s for businesses. Prices, he says, will be competitive with DSL and cable access.

"Philosophically, we believe in DSL and in what we're doing with fixed wireless," says Sutton. "We believe both will evolve over time and find their own niches, but they won't be exactly the same. Fixed wireless will increase the reach of broadband services to entire classes of people who would otherwise be left out -- people in rural areas that surround metropolitan areas."

On the business side, Nextlink plans to deploy point-to-point fixed wireless connections to midsize buildings in metropolitan areas and augment those with point-to-multipoint connections to smaller buildings, says chief technical officer Doug Carter. "To fill in the gaps between copper and fiber, fixed wireless has natural capabilities," he says, regarding the company's 20- to 30-gHz local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) spectrum.

But Nextlink's plans are still mostly on paper. The company has two operational multipoint sites but plans to be in 25 markets with LMDS by year's end, says Carter. If that happens, Nextlink may find itself adding up lots of new broadband customers, instead of old cobblestones.

Kate Gerwig is editor at large for tele.com. She can be reached at kgerwig@cmp.com .

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