Wireless Strikes Back

3rd June , 2004

US : Some wireless ISPs are now offering their customers highly competitive service offerings that appear to provide significant benefits when compared to top-tier fixed line products. Competition will only become fiercer as WiMAX equipment becomes widely available.

Companies such as TowerStream in the eastern half of the US, and west coast-based NextWeb, provide new services and pricing plans which should prove very attractive to enterprise customers now using traditional T1 accounts.

According to Edward Rerisi, ABI Research's Vice President of Research, "TowerStream in New York is offering five megabits per second for about $500 per month. (NextWeb's services scale up to 10 megabits.) Compare that to a T1 service typically offering only 1.5 megabits for about $900 a month. Companies like these offer better pricing, better speed, and fast provisioning to get the service up and running quickly."

Rerisi acknowledges that the reliability of these wireless services isn't quite as high as that of T1, but it's close: "they're realizing 99.99% reliability instead of the 'five 9s' achieved by T1", he said.

TowerStream provides a redundant backbone using point-to-point connections rather than relying on wired infrastructure. In the event of signal failure, base stations are provided with automatic fallback to an unaffected backbone, via microwave relay.

These companies are built on a strategy of targeting densely populated business districts rather than entire regions or residential markets. As lower cost, interoperable WiMAX gear becomes available in 2005, this model will be even more viable.

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