BELLEVUE, Washington-Advanced Radio Telecom Corp. launched commercial services on its new metropolitan area network in Seattle and the surrounding areas, following an eight-week service test by more than 20 business.
ART’s integrated broadband wireless and fiber-optic technology uses a packet switched Internet Protocol and asynchronous transfer mode network architecture to offer wireless data communications services featuring Internet connection speeds of 10 megabits per second, usually available only to direct fiber connections.
The service is being marketed to business users at a lower cost than the existing alternatives, said ART. For about $900 a month, ART provides dedicated Internet Access service at 1.544 megabits per second, which is about half the average costs paid today by businesses for the same service.
“ART can keep its rates so competitive because they’ve taken the middleman out of the equation,” said Peter Henley, information services director for Clark Nuber, one of the pilot test customers in Bellevue.
ART said it is entering the market as an Internet Service Provider, because the demand is greatest for this service. “We will quickly be expanding our product set to include the full range of Security Services, intranet, extranet, VPN and other data services as well as IP telephony,” said Henry Hirsch, ART chairman and chief executive officer.
ART is a “first mile” provider of broadband access and Internet services to the business community. The company has partnered with Lucent Technologies Inc. to be its network integrator to build an IP metropolitan area network in several cities across the nation with ATM backbones to support the range of service it eventually hopes to offer.
ART said it intends to expand its network into the top 100 U.S. markets during the next five years.
