The misfortunes of many in the wired broadband industry are turning into golden opportunities for some in the wireless industry, as customers who have been dumped by their bankrupt cable and digital subscriber line service providers scramble to find other means of getting high-speed Internet connectivity.
One such company is Boston-based Broadband2Wireless Inc., which launched its Airora service this week using the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz unlicensed frequency bands. BB2W currently offers wireless broadband service to several hundred residential and small office customers in Boston, and network deployments are under way in south Florida, New York and Los Angeles.
According to Paul Adams, co-founder and chief executive officer of BB2W, Airora is unique in that it can be provisioned in less than a day, a feat enabled by the core of BB2W’s technology-a back-office operations support system, designed and implemented in cooperation with PricewaterhouseCoopers. It incorporates a Web-based prequalification system that allows prospective customers and network service provider partners to determine Airora’s availability in a given area, sign customers up for service and view and manage accounts via the Web.
“We’re really trying to perfect the process and perfect the network,” said Adams. “We spent a lot of time and money on building the prequalification tool.”
Interested customers can call a toll-free number to find out if their home or office is within a BB2W service area. If the home or office is accessible, BB2W ships the customer a 3-by-4-inch wireless modem overnight, and upon completion of the software installation, which takes a few minutes, the user’s desktop or laptop computer is connected.
“Our feeling is that with a plug-and-play model, we have a huge advantage over DSL and cable modems,” Adams said. “It’s scalable for millions of users.”
Airora delivers data-rate speeds up to 1.5 Megabits per second with little to no interference. An average single BB2W microcell mounted on top of a building serves a 1-mile radius, or about 900 customers, Adams said.
Unlike multichannel multipoint distribution service and local multipoint distribution service providers, operators in the unlicensed frequency bands have the added inconvenience of dealing with others’ signals, but Adams said its not as big a problem as most think.
“I think that was the most overrated problem. We don’t see any of it. The bigger issue is how you deal with home gateway products and Bluetooth, signals that are going to transmit through the windows like we do,” Adams explained.
In fact, BB2W is working on a plan to allow roaming between its network and the 802.11, or Bluetooth, network, but Adams did not indicate when such roaming might be available.
BB2W is marketing its service through partnerships with network service providers, and right now the company has Earthlink under contract, as well as one other undisclosed partner.
Airora costs a flat rate of $50 per month with unlimited use, and the equipment costs $99 for a one-year commitment. If the customer chooses to have service on a month-by-month basis, the one-time equipment cost is $249, BB2W said.
BB2W is privately held.
