Wireless2K Looms - Company Business and Marketing

Cable World
by Jim Barthold
February 28, 2000

Cable operators who believe traditional and upstart telephone companies are their only data competitors better think twice. By year's-end, the Sprint Corp.-MCI Worldcom Inc. colossus plans to launch wireless high-speed Internet service in 20 markets.

"We're going to see MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service) and LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service) taking off," predicted Peter Jarich, a Strategis Group analyst who has studied the subject and is especially bullish on the Sprint/MCI combination.

"When they get together, they're going to have a great set of properties," he said.

Sprint-MCI has big plans "to build out in 20 markets in the United States by the end of this year with high-speed Internet access only," said Sprint spokesman Robert Hoskins.

Although declining to provide specifics, Hoskins noted "we have major operations in Phoenix, San Francisco and the Bay area and Denver."

Telephony comes next

"Voice is something they've played with in the labs," Hoskins explained. "They don't plan on it incorporating into a product bundle until probably the first quarter of 2001. It would be a voice-over-IP (Internet Protocol) solution."

Telephony will add glitter to a sparkling wireless offering by letting operators package services.

"People overlook the idea of bundling," Jarich said. "Service bundling is a major strategy for every local carrier out there. They want to provide more than one service to the customer because, frankly, that's what the customers are demanding."

Vendors, who have gone hungry as the wireless industry scrounged for money, are salivating at the upcoming buffet of possibilities.

"The biggest challenge for broadband fixed wireless over the last five years has really been the cost of the technology and the robustness of the technology and investors or licensees with money or solid business plans," agreed Troy Trenchard, director of marketing-broadband fixed wireless, for Cisco Systems Inc.

Now there is "certainly a window of opportunity," he agreed. "It's much easier to set up a broadband fixed wireless connection than it is to gain rights-of-way and trench fiber or copper or cable. Once you have a node up, bringing a customer on line can be done in a couple days. If they're in range, you go out there, put the antenna on the roof, run some coaxial cable down to your wiring closet and power some boxes."

Cisco, through a industry alliance with such firms as Broadcom Corp. and Nucentrix Broadband Networks Inc., is pushing Vector Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VOFDM) as a way to diminish line-of-sight and multipath transmission problems.

"With VOFDM you can actually make sense of a signal that comes through a tree," Trenchard raved.

Smaller antennas will help.

"We're certainly driving our research and development efforts so eventually you'll be able to stick (an antenna) in the window or on your desk," said Jim Yard, VP-broadband wireless group for antenna maker Andrew Corp.

The desktop antenna enticed Levent Gun to leave 3Com Corp. and join Gigabit Wireless Inc. as president/CEO.

"You can actually use indoor antennas which give you an additional benefit to the wired world because now you get portability," he said.

Today's transceivers

That, though, is in the future. Today's hottest MMDS innovation is two-way transmission via roof-top transceivers that beam data up to 35 miles to transmission towers, fueling business for modem makers like Hybrid Networks Inc. and the newly renamed Vyyo Inc.

"We're totally dedicated to this new market now," said Hybrid's product line management director Robert Furniss.

Hybrid, he said, pushes a proprietary technology that breaks data into three 2 MHz subchannels and is "hesitant to go down the DOCSIS (standardization) route."

"Because you're applying the adaptive equalizer in the modem to a narrower channel, you get a little better than three times the performance, so the multipath is three times better," he said of Hybrid's technology.

This proprietary approach, he said, will jumpstart the data market.

"People who are trying to project standards into wireless because they happen to have one of those kinds of products, won't necessarily get it working," he insisted.

Given the industry's tenuous status and its need for speed to market, "they definitely need a working product and that's where we're focused," he said.

Standardized product proponents, such as Vyyo, disagree.

"With Hybrid, the major issue is the road map," said Arnon Khavi, Vyyo's SVP-strategic relations. "Where are they going? When a company like Sprint/MCI makes a decision, they cannot make a decision based on what you have today because they don't want to rip out all the equipment within six months to a year and buy new equipment."

Vyyo, he said is "trying to bring in the economies of scale and cost of the cable industry into the wireless industry so our products are DOCSIS-based," he said. "What carriers are concerned about more than getting a product right now is capability and the ability to have a migration path. DOCSIS brings the ability."

While there is disagreement about antennas and standards, all agree that the broadband fixed wireless industry, including LMDS and non-licensed spectrum, is about to erupt.

"The subscriber base is going to ramp up just as quickly as the network builds out," said Strategis analyst James Mendelson. "A lot of this growth is going to be driven by a large number of small businesses who will adopt this wireless broadband service."

And that's just the start.

"We're going to see a large-scale ramp-up over the next three years. From about 5% coverage in 2000, we're going to jump anywhere between 20% and 40% coverage of businesses," he said.

"The cool thing about our service is you can put up a tower in the center of town (and) anyone within 35 miles of that tower can get that signal ... whereas a wired person such as a cable network or DSL (digital subscriber line), you have to either lay wires or recondition the existing plan," said Sprint's Hoskins.

That might be the most serious Y2K problem the cable industry will face.

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