Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) News

Craig McCaw BWIA Venture Emerges From Stealth Mode

Cellular industry pioneer Craig McCaw has quietly re-entered the Wireless business, and is poised to ignite an already hot Broadband Wireless Interent Access industry. Unlike his recent involvement with Nextel, this new venture is "all McCaw".

I'll reserve much of the detail of this story, which I've been tracking for more than a month, for the subscribers of FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access. A special issue of FOCUS will be transmitted to subscribers later today and contains an in-depth discussion and analysis of the new McCaw venture.

What has been widely under-reported, until now, is that McCaw has assembled all the pieces necessary for this new venture to quickly emerge in a number of markets. Those pieces include the necessary spectrum, an equipment supplier, back-end services, executive talent, and (presumably) financing.

McCaw began quietly acquiring individual spectrum licenses in the 2.5 - 2.69 GHz MMDS/ITFS band last year through a company called Flux U.S.

McCaw bought a minority stake in NextNet Wireless, a well-regarded BWIA equipment supplier in Minneapolis. This week it was disclosed that McCaw has purchased NextNet Wireless in toto. NextNet's Expedience system is user-installable. The radios can be sold at retail or mail order - a "truck roll" is rarely required.

McCaw has acquired Clearwire, a BWIA service provider that has deployed a test network, and has an exclusive deal with the ITFS Alliance, a consortium of ITFS band licensees for Clearwire to lease those ITFS licenses.

Many of McCaw's most trusted, and now well seasoned, lieutenants have gotten back on board with McCaw for the new venture.

McCaw's core competency is "creative" financing, as he's ably demonstrated with numerous ventures.

Another McCaw core competency is the demonstrated ability to grow a national brand, something that has been lacking in BWIA systems to date.

McCaw's intent is to initially target Tier II cities; Nextel and Sprint currently hold the vast majority of Tier I of 2.5 - 2.69 GHz licenses. McCaw will intially market the service as "fixed", Broadband (up to 1.5 Mbps), Internet. In reality, the NextNet Wireless Expedience system is fully capable of mobility (as in mounted in vehicles - the antenna and radio are somewhat bulky, rendering them largely unsuitable for laptop use) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) such as Vonage and Packet8 services.

McCaw's may well draw upon his relationship with XO Communications (he founded the company as NextLink) for Internet backbone connectivity, "backhaul" services (XO has extensive fiber and wireless licenses [unsuited for direct competition with McCaw]) and most importantly, as a CLEC, extensive telephony capability for when McCaw enables the new service for telephony, in direct competition with wireline telephony.

McCaw is in the process of integrating and relocating all the management and administrative functions of the acquired companies and the new functions in Kirkland, WA... a familiar base of operations for McCaw dating back to the founding of McCaw Cellular.

McCaw's new venture is now operating under the brand of Clearwire, and the web page is operational now at www.clearwire.com.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

VoIP Hype and Skype

Everywhere I go in the United States I now see people with PDAs, laptops and headsets making VoIP calls. This has been compounded and supported by the rapid spread of Wi-Fi providing a very powerful platform for users on the move.

- Peter Cochrane - ZDNet News Commentary, 4/21/2004.

This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

IDT Makes "Wi-Fi Cellular" Service A Reality

I very rarely feature a Press Release verbatim. I'm making an exception here because there's simply not much to add to IDT's statements.

Not only is IDT's "WiFi phone service" a demonstration of the technical feasibility of "Wi-Fi Cellular"... but also a demonstration of economic / market feasibility. It's a bit surreal to be reading of this development, and offering it for comment to readers of this Blog, as I finish the last of my morning coffee fix, using free, public Wi-Fi service within a stone's throw of the headquarters of AT&T Wireless in Redmond, WA.

Text of the IDT Press Release follows.

IDT to Deploy America's First Commercial WiFi Phone Service
Ironbound Section of Newark, New Jersey To Be First Area Covered

Newark, N.J., April 22, 2004 - IDT Corporation today announced plans to deploy the first commercial WiFi phone service in the US. IDT's WiFi phone service will allow users to bypass local phone companies and make domestic and international phone calls via a wireless connection to the internet. IDT plans to initially roll out the WiFi service in select areas of the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey. This initial deployment will provide research to help IDT develop the new service as it is rolled out in other areas. The new phone service will utilize Net2Phone's innovative Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platform. IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT, IDT. C), is a multinational carrier, telephone and technology company. In its April 5th issue, Fortune magazine placed IDT 746th in its ranking of America?s top 1000 companies. Based upon results from last quarter IDT has an annualized revenue rate of more than $2 billion.

"IDT is opening up the next frontier in telecommunications," said Howard Jonas, Chairman of IDT Corp. "By combining WiFi wireless technology with IDT's global telecommunications network and retail distribution, Net2Phone's VoIP platform and the fixed wireless infrastructure of IDT Business Services (Winstar), IDT is providing residential consumers with a more affordable and flexible phone service."

WiFi phone customers will not need their own expensive broadband connection to access the service. IDT will provide wide area WiFi coverage in the targeted neighborhoods. Calls will be routed via Net2Phone's VoIP platform, and terminated by IDT's worldwide telecommunications network and infrastructure. IDT Business Services' (Winstar) fixed wireless network will provide backhaul services for the traffic. IDT is currently deploying its initial network and expects to begin service in Newark within 30-60 days.

"While many are still talking about WiFi phone service, IDT is making it a reality," said Jim Courter, IDT's CEO. "IDT is bringing the first commercial WiFi phone service into the marketplace. Not only have we found a profitable application for WiFi, but we're creating a new industry within telecommunications that can provide basic phone service for a fraction of the cost of traditional phone service."

IDT's network is being designed to be compatible with advances in wireless technology. IDT's WiFi customers will benefit from a seamless transition to WiMax service as that technology matures and becomes more widespread.

"Net2Phone pioneered VoIP," said Stephen Greenberg, CEO of Net2Phone. "Now, together with IDT, we are launching the next generation in telecom. With IDT's reach and infrastructure expertise and Net2Phone's innovative VoIP platform, we are well positioned to ride the burgeoning WiFi network explosion to offer consumers and businesses affordable telephony services."

"Companies like IDT have led the renaissance of Newark," said the Honorable Sharpe James, Mayor of the City of Newark. "Believe it or not, there are still people in America who cannot afford basic home phone service. Now IDT is using its technology to bridge the 'telecommunications divide.' Because of IDT, Newark becomes the first city in America where affordable WiFi phone service will be commercially available."

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh (excluding the text of the IDT Press Release). This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Reader Response On The Ascendence of Wi-Fi (updated)

I received some exceptionally clueful comments from Bob McIntyre of Host Partners on some of my recent articles about my projections of "The Ascendance of Wi-Fi". McIntyre's comments are well-qualified - he was the Sales Director of Lucent/Agere's ORINOCO Wi-Fi product line and was a founding partner of a Wireles Internet Service Provider.

I'll let McIntyre have his say in full, with my followup comments at the end.

The bottom line is that WiFi was never designed or intended to be used in any public location, unless you add some proprietary client software. (There are the two words to stop any wide spread adoption of a technology - proprietary and client.) Lucent did field trial a public version call "PubLAN" that used a proprietary client that did all the VPN/EAP per session; per client encryption we are trying to get to today. And it was tested on the Sprint and WorldCom networks in 2000. WiFi was designed for the office and for locations were added cabling was too expensive or simply not an option. (One of the first WiFi locations that used WiFi was a Catholic Monastery in northern Italy in 1991.)

So what is the solution for the portable wireless data nomad that is hooked on portable high-speed Internet? The answer lies in another set of questions - "How many different WiFi or wireless data operators are there out there and who has the most locations for you to use while traveling?" What is important about this question is that the numbers do not matter. What matters is the more operators you have, the fewer locations are available for easy and consistent QoS access where you travel.

Now we are down to the price.

For those that are "early adopters" and the technogeeks, WiFi is a cool way to stay connected. (I know, I am one.) For the rest of the population, my money is now on the cellular guys. They will now begin to capitalize on the WiFi rush as people find out that they can get the critical email and downloads with a cellular data service in many, many more places than they can get a WiFi connection. And it is a lot more secure. And the price is coming down.

I now pay Verizon Wireless $45 a month for unlimited bandwidth. I used my service while driving from Savannah to Atlanta on Easter Sunday to check out the Masters scores in real-time, as well as get a jump on the Monday avalanche of email. Had a 230 kbps connection, with a real through put of 50 Kbps while on the road! Then last night, my super high speed 3Mbps Comcast cable Internet service died. From 8 PM until after 1 AM, no connection. That is Internet prime time around this house for email slaves to chip away at business of the day. My wife and I resorted to the Verizon Wireless 1X service and got all our mail and Internet work done by sharing my 1X service. It was twice as fast as any dial-up and as Verizon launches EVDO, the next generation, the speed will jump 3-5 times. (I shouldn't promote it so I will have more bandwidth for
myself.)

Hello cellular data, bye-bye WiFi.

Stroh followup comments:

I have no disagreement with McIntyre that Wi-Fi was never intented/envisioned/designed... or even well-suited for the uses it is being put to. That said... the intentions of the original designers of a particular technolgy often wind up being largely irrelevant (I doubt Henry Ford envisioned a drive-through Starbucks :-) As the IDT story posted later today will make clear, ready or not, "better technology and/or services be damned", Wi-Fi is being pressed into numerous roles that weren't originally envisioned for it. Wi-Fi doesn't have to be a perfect fit for those roles... just better than the available alternatives and accessible to those who wish to do and try innovative things.

I also don't have any fundamental disagreement with McIntyre that "serious" road warriors to whom time is, not just money, but "tens of dollars per minute", hunting for a Wireless HotSpot isn't cost effective or desireable, not to mention wrestling with a myriad of authentication and payment schemes. But... will you have to "go hunting?" Will you have to "wrestle" much longer? I posit that neither of those issues will be the case much longer. The more Wireless HotSpots come online, the more incentive there is to come to an agreement and get everyone in on the revenue... yes, even the "free" Wireless HotSpots by offering an overlay "you pay, you get Priority and Quality Of Service".

Even if Verizon and other wireless telephony providers do eventually offer unlimited use 300-500 Kbps services for $45/month (I rate this as unlikely), that still won't dent the growing market for Wireless HotSpots. The market for Wi-Fi access isn't just "road warriors"... it's, well, everything... Nintendo Gameboys... Apple iPods... Palm PDAs... cars... VOIP services like Vonage... none of which are likely to be connected to the Internet via Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess, but rather via a Wi-Fi chip that will be a standard feature of those units and you can make use of it, or not. Wi-Fi is now inexpensive, unobtrusive (small form factor of the chips) and power-efficient that it's reasonable to build it in even though the customer may not actually use that feature... at first.

We'll see far more Wi-Fi services deployed because its technology is now firmly in the hands of the innovators who can take the technology and create innovative, useful, and increasingly lucrative services with it. That's a stark contrast with Verizon and company whose energies are directed towards capturing more revenue from ring tones and downloadable games than in providing reasonably-priced, reasonable-performance ubiquitous Wireless Internet Access.

McIntyre's point about sharing the Verizon Wireless connection with the rest of the family is prescient. I've observed the same type of usage when I get together with a my crowd of fellow Amateur Radio Operators. One of us brings his Verizon Wireless wireless modem which gets plugged into a small Linux box and Wi-Fi access point and the Internet access is thus shared out to as many as a dozen users that connect to the Linux router via Wi-Fi. This is easily portable to, for example, making every public transit bus its own Wireless HotSpot.

All this said... if McIntyre will put me in touch with his secret contact at Verizon Wireless for the "$45/month deal" (a quick check at Verizon Wireless' BroadbandAccess service with my Seattle-area zip code says $79/month)... I might go for it too. Then again that $45 is more than a month's worth of Jerzy's great coffee, free Wi-Fi Internet Access included.

Update 4/25/2004 - McIntyre replied with the particulars: "The $45/mon deal I have with Verizon Wireless is 'for PDA or SmartPhone device users on selected calling plans.' I have sent a copy of the plan brochure in a separate email. I got the deal when I purchased the
Samsung i600. On the whole, I agree with all your comments for WiFi in a private network."

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh (except for Bob McIntyre text). This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Amusing WiMAX Quote

In an interview with Orthogon Systems CEO Phil Bolt yesterday, I asked "one of the usual questions" - what about WiMAX? I didn't capture the exact quote... I was laughing too hard... but it went something like this:

"We're members of WiMAX and we're watching closely what they're doing. Our system is mostly a software-defined radio, and all of the parameters of what WiMAX will be doing when they get around to a 5.8 GHz certification are well within our radio's capabilities. So, while we certainly will offer a WiMAX option... we suspect it won't be very popular because turning on "WiMAX mode" will actually degrade the system's overall performance and reliability."

Again... I want to make it abundantly clear that's not a quote from Bolt... but it's as closely paraphrased as I can make it.

Bolt made a number of other such pithy observations in the interview, for an article in an upcoming issue of FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Ensemble Communications and Orthogon Systems - Most Recent Ying and Yang of BWIA

A story in America's Network this week states that Ensemble Communications is out of business. Ensemble had a good product - "advanced" Broadband Wireless Internet Access systems that operated in the licensed millimeter-wave (LMDS) bands such as 28 GHz. The problem is that the market for such equipment is limited. The market is dominated by a few key suppliers - Harris, Stratex Networks, P-Com, Alcatel, and a few others that have close ties and long term contracts and relationships with the incumbent licensees of 28 GHz. There simply isn't much market share available to a new entrant. It's very, very tough for a new entrant to achieve traction in a market that doesn't value innovation. Products for this market simplydon't need to be good or better as the customers aren't demanding it. The products don't have to get better - the license takes care of any concerns about intereference. The customers' engineering staffs have gotten comfortable with the overall performance of the existing products and can't make a case to management for going to new systems when the old ones work well enough.

Potential new customers look at 28 GHz with its limited range, expensive radios, and unavailable, crowded spectrum, and requirements to engage a consultant to survey, engineer, and "sign off on" any new links (which takes months, typically) and say... uh, no. Then they call up a company like Orthogon Systems...

Orthogon Systems makes a new generation of point-to-point BWIA systems that are nothing short of amazing. They threw an amazing amount of technology at the problem of maintaining reliable, high-bandwidth p-p links, even when the "Line Of Sight" path is obstructed. If a link can be establshed at all, it's reliable. Orthogon makes a simple proposition to prospective customers - our gear will almost certainly be able to establish a link with reasonable speed and more-than-acceptable reliability. If it doesn't, you're entitled to a refund. So, customers buy it, line it up (not too tough; it's very forgiving), and the radios automatically tune themselves first for reliability and second for speed. And you're done. Quantity One List price for a link (2 radios) is about US$12,000 for speeds up to 33 Mbps and range up to 100 miles (though that was a special build of software for one client). Oh yes... the Orthogon unit operates in the license-exempt 5.8 GHz band.

So why is Orthogon growing and thriving while Ensemble is planning its going-out-of-business sale? It boils down to two fundamental points of change in the Broadband Wireless Internet Access business:

1) License-exempt systems sell in far greater quantity, to a rapidly expanding market than do licensed systems, because anyone with the money can buy them and put them to use... yes, even individuals (how do you think all those Silicon Valley execs get fast Internet to their mountain retreats where there aren't phone lines, let alone DSL, cable modems, or even T-1 circuits?)

2) There is agressive competition for License-exempt systems. If the systems you're offering for sale aren't getting better, faster, cheaper all the time, the competition will happily "relieve your pain". No comfortable oligopies in the license-exempt BWIA industry!

Thus... subtly... but inexorably... the Darwinian Effect of License-exempt Wireless asserts itself. License-exempt systems have already far surpassed licensed systems in sophistication, usability, efficiency, and there is no less of an effect on "legacy" systems already in use in license-exempt spectrum. It's no real leap of imagination or faith to forsee the day when license-exempt spectrum allocation displaces licensed spectrum allocation, because the radios can work things out for themselves.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Excellent Cometa Interview, and Some Comments

Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News posted an excellent interview of Cometa yesterday that goes a long way towards answering a number of lingerling questions about Cometa. The reason so much attention is paid to Cometa is that they are the only "pure play", to date, for Wireless HotSpots and as such are something of a bellwether on the idea of Wireless HotSpots. The interview is recommended reading; it's the "hardest" information I've seen to date on Cometa given that it's not a public company and is by design somewhat secretive given its somewhat convoluted (and changing) partnership structure.

Not discussed in the interview are three key trends I forsee that have direct bearing on the Wireless HotSpot business, and Cometa as one of the largest players in Wireless HotSpots.

Roaming, Absence Of Sane Policies, Industry Cooperation - In my discussions, those who use Wireless HotSpots are willing to pay... they just want to pay once and "use most anywhere", which means an industry-wide roaming clearninghouse, which Cometa is in a position to directly influence. Cometa partner IBM would be a natural on getting this done, and indeed I expected that IBM would have publicly weighed in before now on this issue. After all, this "product" doesn't require a network to be built for the purpose of exchanging roaming settlements and authentication; that's inherent in the product (Internet access). Wayport, iPass, Cometa, even Boingo need to get behind this and get Roaming done. For example, as I write this I'm sitting in Jerzeys Coffee in Redmond, WA which offers free Wi-Fi service as an amenity. What's ironic in the extreme is that Jerzeys is practically in the shadow of the headquarters buildings of AT&T Wireless. I'm at Jerzeys because of the free Wi-Fi and keep coming back because of the excellent coffee and customer service (thanks Kalika!) It's not that I'm unwilling to pay $20/month for Wireless HotSpot service... it's that I'm unwilling to pay $20/month for Wireless HotSpot service several tiimes - to AT&T Wireless (covers the excellent Tully's chain here... and McDonalds... in the Seattle area via Cometa), T-Mobile (Starbucks, of course), Boingo and/or Wayport (various venues), even Seattle-area newcomer Telerama. In the absence of the option to go to any of those for one reasonable monthly charge... I come to Jerzeys.

Wireless Hotzones / Metro Wi-Fi - I wonder how much business paid Wi-Fi HotSpots will get in Cerritos, CA now that there is ubiquitous metropolitan Wi-Fi coverage for (as discussed above) one reasonable monthly fee? In my earliest analysis of Cometa, I predicted that the only way Cometa could actually achieve its ambitious deployment targets would be to use extended coverage Wi-Fi systems such as Vivato. All of the large-scale Wireless HotSpot service providers seem to be in blissful ignorance of this trend... to their peril. I have yet to read of any of metropolitan-area deployment where iPass, GRIC, Boingo, Wayport, etc. had negotiated roaming agreements with such systems. Wireless HotSpots will be no less Darwinian a business than the overall Broadband Wireless Internet Access industry demonstratably is; businesses simply won't have years to "get it right" or "tune their business model".

AT&T Wireless - The Next Generation - In the aftermath of the announcement of Cingular's winning bids for the assets of AT&T Wireless, AT&T was very public in its statements that the brand name AT&T Wireless was not an asset that had been sold to Cingular, and that upon the closing of the sale, would revert back to AT&T. It's not much of an extapolation to imagine that AT&T could quickly repurpose AT&T Wireless to be to Wireless HotSpots what AT&T is quickly becoming to DSL and cable modem broadband service - an "overlay, or virtual brand" for Internet services ("legendary AT&T customer service and reliability"). AT&T still has sufficient market heft to negotiate individual roaming agreements with infrastructure partners and consumer brand recognition to make it a force in the still-nascent Wireless HotSpots industry.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Vyyo Debuts 700 MHz Equipment

Vyyo, long counted out by nearly everyone in the BWIA industry except for its agressive push into China, has become one of a very small club to ship a BWIA system for the nascent 700 MHz band (newly-reclaimed television broadcast channels 52-69.)

The conventional wisdom of the BWIA industry is to eschew 700 MHz because 1) It is still in contention, with some television broadcasters still operating in that spectrum, and 2) There is little demonstrated demand for 700 MHz systems.

What the savviest BWIA Service Providers have discerned is that the existing television broadcast operations are of no real consequence. There is more than adequate spectrum in the 700 MHz band to allow the television broadcasting to continue indefinitely and also offer BWIA services.

Notably, in actually shipping 700 MHz systems, Airspan and now Vyyio have stolen the lead on 700 MHz from BWIA industry giant Alvarion. Even WaveRider Communications, the first to effectively exploit the "abandoned" 902-928 MHz band and whose 900 MHz Last Mile Solution systems could have been relatively easily adapted for the 700 MHz band chose not to do so. This will likely be a case where Alvarion and others, apparently consumed by the mania not to miss the "WiMAX juggernaut" will have to play catch-up to offer competing products for the 700 MHz band as it rapidly becomes more popular. By developing and gaining experience with 700 MHz products now, those vendors are positioning themselves to rapidly exploit an even more lucrative opportunity for BWIA services- a rumored plan to allow license-exempt sharing of television broadcast channels 14-51 (that will remain after the conversion to digital is "complete".)

Ref. - Vyyo Press Release

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Forbes - Into Thin Air

In an April 26, 2004 cover story in Forbes titled Into Thin Air, authors Scott Woolley and Quentin Hardy offer a refreshingly clueful (for the general business press) look at the grim prospects of the conventional telecommunications business, rehashing the now familiar story of how wireline carriers are facing severe competition to their conventional voice services from Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP).

But the authors venture into new territory, spotting a nascent threat to the supposedly bright future of wireless telephony carriers... VOIP over Wi-Fi. Exerpt:

Last year American home users bought 12.7 million Wi-Fi transmitters for their computers, says research firm In-Stat/MDR. That poses a ready audience for a second major threat confronting big carriers: Voice over Wi-Fi, which lets callers use free airwaves to gain wireless access to the Internet. A home or office Wi-Fi network for a laptop's wireless Internet access provides a ready-made pathway for Wi-Fi-enabled phones. Voice over Wi-Fi threatens to steal traffic from the cellular business (with $88 billion in annual revenue in the U.S.), already a harshly competitive world where per-minute prices have fallen by half in the last three years. Few users now have Wi-Fi phones, since currently the phones only work in places like San Antonio Community Hospital that have thorough Wi-Fi coverage. (Leave the hospital, the phone stops working.)

While the authors are to be applauded for having picked up on VOIP over Wi-Fi... they missed the larger trend entirely, that VOIP/WI-Fi phones used in enterprises and homes won't stop working when leaving the "private" Wi-Fi coverage of an enterprise or home. In places like Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the city of Cerritos, California, the Auckland, New Zealand metopolitan area, Spokane, Washington, and soon Silicon Valley, ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage will be available. (Each of these examples are existing deployments of "Metro Wi-Fi" by different vendors.)

Then again, I can't really fault the Forbes editors for not "finishing the story". The threat of VOIP over Wi-Fi potentially destroying tens of billions of dollars of market value of wireless telephony companies is plenty frightening to Forbes' audience of corporate and investor readers... the idea that such value destruction is actually in progress is probably too terrifying to commit to the pages of Forbes.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh (exclusive of the except from Forbes). This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Wireless Tech Radio - It Keeps Getting Better

Wireless Tech Radio, the streaming talk radio show about Wireless Technology that I co-host along with Jim Sutton and Marlon Schafer of Odessa Office Equipment on Wednesday mornings at 10:00 Eastern (live; archives are available) just keeps getting better.

It's notable that Sutton, who runs the WTR operation from a spare room in his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, cannot get wireline Broadband Internet Access... so "Wireless Tech Radio" is streamed, live, using a Broadband Wireless Internet Access link from a local Wireless ISP.

This morning's show was probably our best yet as the Host and co-Hosts are settling into their stride with the show. The first of today's three segments was "Wireless news of the week", and we didn't get through half of the items that were in queue. Our second segment was an interview with David Gell, VP of Engineering for Solectek talking about the NLOS characteristics OFDM systems. The final segment was an interview with Jack Unger, author of the excellent "Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide Area Networks." All three segments were full of interesting bits that you simply won't learn about elsewhere.

For example, co-host Schafer discussed last week's meeting at the FCC between a new "task force" on Broadband Wireless and a small group of Wireless ISPs. Unger is a sought-after speaker, instructor, and consultant on the subject of building Wireless Internet Service Provider operations and his all-day class was one of the primary draws for ISPs attending the recently concluded ISPCON.

Wireless Tech Radio is, for the moment, a labor of love (it's surprising how little the microprocessor and PC revolutions have impacted the ability to mix and manage multiple audio sources; Sutton has a considerable investment in audio mixing hardware that would be at home in any small radio broadcaster), but like the small Wireless ISPs that it regularly features, WTR will rapidly become a force to be reckoned with, providing news about Wireless that simply isn't available through any other venue. Highly specialized realtime content like WTR has come of age because the tools are getting better and with user broadband connections, the Internet is now a more-than-viable distribution medium.

Not to mention it's so very cool WTR's production audio feed is being delivered from Sutton's mixing console and streaming encoder to the streaming server via Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

Steve Stroh

Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.