Musings Upon the State of Broadband Wireless in the US
I haven't blogged on my own site in a while. My apologies for this. I do blog regularly on www.wimax.com and on www.wimax360.com for those who would like to see my more recent blogs.
What I wanted to do today was catch up with some of my current thought on the overall industry and where it is going. Lets start with Municipal Wireless. Probably no major broadband wireless industry initiative has become high profile and bust in near record time the way Muni Wireless has. Arguably, EarthLink both launched the industry and perhaps recently sounded its death knell by transferring the first of its five operations to the local city governments for free. The whole industry just got mired down by its bad business plans. And for their part the cities just wanted to get on the gravy train of getting something for free. I actually thought the industry had more legs than this, and that while it was the current bandwagon it could evolve into something useful. But nobody (much) found a business model that worked. And the result was chaos and loss. I suppose that my old WISP instincts about knowing where revenue was coming from for every major expense should have given me a better clue. I will listen to my gut better next time.
So where goes WiMAX in the US. Sprint and Clearwire are still in a holding pattern. I am hopeful that something good could come out of that if the companies and their investors can pump enough cash into some joint venture to get it started. Barry West recently said that ramping up WiMAX has been a lot harder than expected. I wonder if the bootstrap to real 4G will be that way for everybody. After all LTE technology is pretty close to WiMAX anyway. Hmmm? Meanwhile, smaller regional companies with licensed spectrum are moving on with WiMAX or precursor fixed/portable plays reasoning that those are strong enough to get customers—and they are. WiMAX needs some mobile certified gear as soon as possible.
The big 700 MHz auction was largely about the rich getting richer. For all its cheerleading Google did not succeed in forcing the C-block to be open to any operator and so Verizon ended up controlling it. AT&T was the other big winner. Some smaller regional plays got spectrum. As usual there is still a dearth of spectrum for small companies around the US who might deploy quickly if they could get some. Our public spectrum policy still leaves a lot to be desired. Sure this 700 spectrum has a four year build out requirement (once the spectrum is cleared by broadcasters), but when did industry giants NOT get an extension on such things—really?
So what is everybody else to do? I think the new 3.65 GHz spectrum offers huge opportunity for smaller independents. Three companies, Redline, Airspan and Alvarion have gear for the band, which is all WiMAX-based but obviously not really WiMAX as there is no product profile for this spectrum range. Interestingly, Alvarion's gear seems to be 802.16e based versus the others 802.16d based. I was surprised at that. In any event, minus the exclusion zone issues, you can deploy anywhere you want by just applying for a national license (takes 15 minutes I am told) and less than $250. Then you just register your base stations. This band will gain converts quickly if the gear works well.
I just completed putting together the Tower Technology Summit at CTIA for Light Reading. That was fun and got good reviews plus strong attendance. The Tower Industry is very healthy right now and will continue to be I think.
What else? There is plenty but this blog is already too long. Stay tuned for more.
Tim Sanders
tim@thefinalmile.net www.thefinalmile.net www.wimaxglobalnews.com
