WinStar Communications Inc. last week announced it signed agreements with Siemens Telecom Networks and Broadband Networks Inc., which will allow WinStar to supply digital multipoint local network systems for deployment in the United States.
The company, which now provides point-to-point services, said it plans to begin offering point-to-multipoint services by the end of the year. Siemens has agreed to supply systems integration and support services and BNI will supply digital multipoint radio access systems used in the network architecture.
WinStar’s service provides broadband communications-voice, Internet, data and video traffic-over wireless spectrum. Its 38 GHz licenses allow it to transmit larger amounts of information than narrowband licenses would allow.
“A good analogy is to think of drinking something out of a straw-which is the narrowband-vs. drinking something coming out of a fire hose,” said Louise Goodman, vice president of corporate communications at WinStar.
The company currently takes broadband traffic from buried fiber-optic cables and transmits it the “last mile” over radio frequencies to a customer’s phone system. The point-to-point method, which the company already provides, requires a one-to-one ratio of radios-each radio on a customer site must have a corresponding radio at a hub site.
Now the company is planning to deploy a point-to-multipoint service, which provides the same function, but with only one radio at a hub site that can communicate with each remote radio simultaneously.
“What a multipoint network allows you to do is lower your costs to build your network, and it allows you to virtually offer bandwidth on demand,” said Goodman.
“The customer might need a lot of bandwidth this moment-if they’re shipping a video conference, or something-but 10 minutes from now they might just have phone conversations going on, which would not require as much of the bandwidth.
“They have it when they need it, but they’re not necessarily paying for it all the time,” she continued.
Providing a service that transmits broadband communications over wireless spectrum to a customer’s rooftop makes economic sense when compared with the costs involved in installing a fiber-optic cable in a building, said Goodman.
“The advantages of doing that is instead of taking six men to dig up the street with a back hoe and a dump truck to put a fiber-optic service into a building, we can take a 12-inch radio and put it on top of a building and then bring the telecommunications traffic in through the rooftop,” said Goodman. “It’s just a difference of where you bring the technology in.
“The beauty of wireless technology is you can deploy it faster and at a lower cost because you don’t have all the labor costs involved that you do when you’re digging up the streets to put in fiber-optic optics.”
