NEW YORK-Metricom Inc. will mark its second commercial launch within a month when it begins offering its data-only wireless Internet access services in late September in the Washington, D.C., area.
The company, headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., has provided wireless data applications to the utilities industry for more than a decade. But recent and pending commercial launches are targeted to an entirely different user-individuals. Furthermore, Metricom views its competitors as Internet access providers, not personal communications services carriers, said Alan Saldich, director of strategic business development.
In late August, the company went online over the airwaves in the Seattle area. Since it began marketing its services in March in the San Francisco Bay area, the company has gained 2,000 customers, the largest being Hewlett-Packard Co., Sal-dich said.
The first phase of the Washington launch will cover the District of Columbia north to Maryland suburbs like Gaithersburg and Rockville. Metricom is in negotiations with northern Virginia cities including Arlington, Alexandria and Reston for the second phase of its commercial rollout.
“Building our networks is a piece of cake. We don’t have to deal with community aversion because our cells are so tiny,” Saldich said.
Metricom designs and manufactures cells the size of an electric current adapter. On street lights, its primary cell site location, the adapter plugs into the outlet that powers the sensor, which turns the lights on at dusk and off at dawn. The sensors then plug back into Metricom’s radio cells.
Deployed at densities of about seven per square mile, the heavy-duty cells-in use by utilities in areas like Alaska and the Mojave Desert-override most weather-related reception problems associated with wireless communications, Saldich said.
TV remote control-sized modems, which plug into laptop computer serial ports, instantly scan and prioritize cell sites nearest to the operator. The combination of technologies employed offers a key advantage in helping relieve the overloaded Internet system, Saldich said. Even if the modem is turned on, no capacity is used unless data is transmitted. Typical online services tie up the Internet network whenever the modem is turned on.
Nor does the company have to deal with Federal Communications Commission licensing requirements because it uses the unlicensed public radio spectrum known as the ISM, or Industrial, Scientific and Medical band. The company does have the FCC’s authorization for its radios to operate on all of ISM’s 162 channels.
Instead, the complicated part of Metricom’s rollout is negotiating with three different entities that have jurisdiction over the street light cell sites Metricom wants to lease.
First, the company must lease space on each lamp from the agency that controls street lights. Then it must reach agreements with the electric utility to pay for the power each 10-watt cell uses in its round-the-clock operation. A separate set of agreements must also be reached with whichever government entity owns the land and/or air rights under and around the posts.
In the District of Columbia area, the complexity of this process was reduced substantially by the know-how of Potomac Electric Power Co., which has a 20 percent stake in a joint venture there with Metricom.
The service offered in all three areas is called Ricochet. Basic service is a flat $30 monthly fee.
