Cutting the cord
NEW YORK – Consumers chafe at having only two choices – phone line and cable – for high-speed Internet service. For businesses, there are often even fewer options – the offerings of the phone company – due to the limitations of cable. That’s changing, at least in major cities. Internet service providers that use wireless technology to bypass the phone companies’ near-monopoly now appear to be gaining traction after a false start at the height of the Internet boom.
The difference between then and now is WiMax, an emerging technology sometimes described as a cousin of the Wi-Fi standard used at home and coffee shop hot spots. WiMax, however, is capable of much greater range, in the tens of miles, and higher speeds.
From the roof of a 27-story Manhattan building, Towerstream Corp. CEO Jeff Thompson can look out over a vast swath of the city, from low-rises in Greenwich Village to the skyscrapers of Midtown. The Towerstream antennas mounted on the roof have the same panoramic view, sending and receiving customers’ data.
“I call this our bowl of business,” Thompson said. “Every building you can see from here can be a Towerstream customer.”
Towerstream sells connections of up to a gigabit per second, in both directions, but most are less than 20 megabits per second. That’s not hugely different from consumer download speeds, but the upstream flow of data is much faster, which is important to businesses.
Speeds like that aren’t in sight for consumer WiMax, and it will be years before it’s available in most areas. Sprint Nextel Corp. is the major carrier that’s planning to roll out WiMax, starting with Chicago later this year, but its long-term commitment to the technology is in question after Chief Executive Gary Forsee was forced out in early October. Sprint also backed out of a plan to combine its WiMax network with that of Clearwire Corp., which focuses on medium-sized cities.
Kirkland-based Clearwire has begun testing a new wireless service in the Seattle area that the company says is the precursor to true WiMax. It expects to offer that mobile WiMax service next year.
Business access is low-hanging fruit for WiMax deployment. Offices are usually clustered in business districts. They don’t move around, making it possible to put up a fixed antenna, ideally with a clear line sight to the transmitter.
Other business-oriented WISPs, or wireless Internet service providers, have popped up as well. In Texas, for instance, iBroadband Inc. serves businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin with WiMax equipment.
Apart from New York, Middletown, R.I.-based Towerstream now sells service to Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Providence, R.I., and Boston, where it started service in 2001.
That’s also the year that saw the collapse of the previous wave of “fixed wireless broadband” providers. Two of the big names in the business, Teligent and Winstar Communications, filed for bankruptcy after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build their networks, but failed to get enough customers before money ran out.
Going back even further, telecommunications companies and the military have for decades used wireless links for long-haul data transport, or to connect to difficult locations.
But that was before WiMax, which made fixed wireless connections cheaper and faster. It’s backed by a broad industry group that includes big names like Intel Corp. and Samsung, and a host of smaller equipment makers. Equipment from different manufacturers is supposed to be able work together, though the certification process is still in its early stages. Of particular benefit to Towerstream, WiMax lets it use unlicensed, and thus free, spectrum to reach customers.