(Nextlink claims 36 cities - I counted 37.)
It's taken a long time - XO Holdings, Inc. has has owned substantial blocks of spectrum for many years now and has been through bankruptcy and back and has very seriously considered, and then reconsidered selling its spectrum.
But XO's new subsidiary Nextlink Wireless, Inc. is really starting to gain traction in offering Broadband Wireless Internet Access services in a large number of US cities now. They claim to be "... the nation's largest deployment of fixed broadband wireless technology to provide last mile and middle mile network access solutions for wireless and wireline telecommunications service providers." With the proviso of fixed Broadband Wireless Services, I wouldn't dispute that claim.
Markets that Nextlink now serves:
- Akron, OH
- Atlanta, GA
- Austin, TX
- Baltimore, MD
- Boston, MA
- Chicago, IL
- Cleveland, OH
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Columbus, OH
- Dallas, TX
- Denver, CO
- Detroit, MI
- Fort Lauderdale, FL
- Houston, TX
- Kansas City (KS? MO? Both?)
- Las Vegas, NV
- Los Angeles, CA
- Memphis, TN
- Miami, FL
- Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN
- Nashville, TN
- Oakland, CA
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Portland, (OR? ME?)
- Sacramento, CA
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- San Francisco, CA
- Seattle, WA
- St. Louis, MO
- San Jose, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Tucson, AZ
- Washington, DC
- Wilmington, DE
The combination of XO's extensive fiber availability and Broadband Wireless Internet Access through Nextlink is a powerful one - if a customer can't be reached by fiber, likely they can be reached by wireless.
Nextlink operates in Local Multipoint Distribution Services (LMDS) band at 28 GHz (they claim 28-31, and 39 GHz, the latter two of which were news to me). Nextlink provides speeds of 1.544 Mbps (better known as T-1 speed) through 155 Mbps (better known as OC-3 speed). Nextlink will be losing money on the equipment install if all they're selling is a T-1 to a single customer in a building (the Teligent / Winstar business model).
Nextlink apparently sells its connectivity to service providers and resellers - it doesn't appear to sell directly to businesses. It's instructive that Nextlink is trying to appeal to telecom carriers and resellers who are used to offering T-1 and other "telecom" services, rather than appealing to the Information Technology officers at companies who tend to think of, shop for, and price out their Internet connectivity in increments, or fractions of 10 Mbps Ethernet - 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps , 100 Mbps, 150 Mbps, etc. In contrast, Towerstream offers customers services like 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps, pitching directly to enterprises and IT managers (though Towerstream does "go low, also offering T-1 equivalent service).
It will be interesting to see how Nextlink's services stack up against FiberTower Corp. (merged with First Avenue Networks, which merged with surviving assets of Teligent, to combine FAN's acquisition of Advanced Radio Telecom's 39 GHz licenses with Teligent's 24 GHz licenses). FiberTower had the "carrier's carrier" Broadband Wireless Internet Access market all to itself for a while, but seems to have settled into a comfortable business of supporting communications hubs such as towers and rooftops.
Little has been heard from WinStar, so I did a quick check and discovered (thanks, Light Reading!) that IDT had spun out WinStar and it's now known as GVCwinstar, and apparently still providing Broadband Wireless Internet Access, though IDT had commenced a sell-off of its spectrum. WinStar rounded out my Big Four of Broadband Wireless Internet Access companies (Advanced Radio Telecom [ART], Teligent, WinStar, and XO Communications) that rose so spectacularly in the mid-1990's, and fell just as hard during the telecom crash.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh
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