Wireless Last Mile
In October 2002, at
Owensboro, a small Kentucky city on the Ohio River, after a five-month pilot
program, the local electricity and water provider, Owensboro Municipal
Utilities (OMU), rolled out a high-speed broadband service to the city's 58 000
residents at US $25 a month, just $2 more than what many were paying for
low-speed dial-up access. In a short six months since launching service, OMU
Online has connected more than 700 customers with broadband access. Currently,
it has a backlog of several hundred connections, and expects to have a total of
1,500 customers by the end of the year.
What make these
enterprises novel aren't the data rates, which aren't exceptional for
broadband, at 250-1000 Kb/s. It's the way that the bits are
delivered-wirelessly-at least for the critical last mile to the home. Bypassing
the copper wires that connect a phone company's central offices to its
customers, these wireless Internet service providers can deliver broadband more
cheaply than digital subscriber lines (DSLs) and can reach out to rural homes
and others not currently served at all except by dial-up.
The two providers are
destined to be midwives to the next generation of broadband: wireless
metropolitan-area networks (MANs). Propelled in part by a new standard, IEEE
802.16, wireless MANs are expected to do for neighborhoods, villages, and
cities what IEEE 802.11, the standard for wireless local-area networks, is
doing for homes, coffee shops, airports, and offices.
The reason is that OMU
and Always On represent opposing approaches to wireless MANs from two of the
technology's top system vendors, Alvarion Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel, and Carlsbad,
Calif.) and Soma Networks Inc. (San Francisco). Alvarion has embraced the
802.16 standard and is a founding member of the WiMax Forum (San Jose, Calif.),
an industry consortium created to commercialize it and a corresponding standard
from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute known as HIPERMAN. The
institute is based in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Alvarion's existing
wireless last-mile products, and those of the other WiMax members, are designed
for wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), making the connection between
homes and the Internet backbone that lets end users bypass their telephone
companies. Soma, reluctant to abandon or change a five-year odyssey of its
wireless MAN technology development, and believing it to be superior to
anything its competitors have, is ready to stand apart from the standard and go
it alone. Its system, while eminently usable by WISPs, is chock full of
quality-of-service features that help it transport voice-over-Internet-protocol
packets. That means it's especially well positioned to be adopted by the phone
companies themselves.
Andrew B. King of Web
Site Optimization LLC (Ann Arbor, Mich.) predicts that 50 percent of all
Internet access will be broadband by July 2004, and that this will climb to
two-thirds just a year later. But if the future of telecommunications lies in
broadband services, that only spells more trouble for phone companies. They've
staked their broadband futures on DSL, which provides data rates 10-20 times as
fast as dial-up on the same old copper phone lines. Creating a wireless network
is relatively simple. At its heart is a base station, which can be put on top
of a building's roof, a cellular tower, or even a water tower. The base station
is the bridge between the wired world of the Internet, on one end, and
subscribers, with whom it is connected by radio waves, on the other. With each
station generally serving a 10- to 15-km radius, base stations can be put up
where-and only where-they're economically justified.
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