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Jim Barthold
The other shoe has dropped. AT&T, as promised, is accelerating its broadband fixed wireless telephony and data service and adding new markets where it has neither its own cable systems nor partnerships with the incumbents. The company's wireless group last week said it would buy $250 million worth of products and services from Lucent Technologies and would accelerate the launch of wireless services it hopes will pass "about 15 million homes by the end of 2002 in 40 markets," according to spokesman Ritch Blasi.
Called AT&T Digital Broadband, the service uses various wireless spectrum and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology to deliver "non line-of-sight" fixed wireless broadband services.
AT&T started selling the service in the Fort Worth-Dallas, Texas market in March and now has about 2,500 customers who, for $25 a month, get a telephone line, three calling features and all long distance calls at 7 cents per minute. Data customers pay $35 a month for 512 kilobits per second (Kbps) of downstream speed and 128 Kbps upstream.
That market uses 10 MHz of the 1900 PCS wireless spectrum, as will an upcoming service start in San Diego, Blasi says. Houston, Los Angeles and Anchorage, Alaska, will be served via the 2.3 GHz WCS spectrum.
In every case, Blasi says, the service will compete with incumbent cable and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services if they are available.
"It's about choice," he says. "I'm going to come in and provide high-speed data services just the way they (incumbents) would if their infrastructure is upgraded. When we went into Dallas and Fort Worth, for example, DSL was not available to a lot of these customers, nor was cable.
"It's just another alternative that they can choose from," he insists.
AT&T, of course, is not offering the service in markets where it has existing cable operations or partnership deals with other MSOs, Blasi says. The Lucent deal, however, indicates AT&T is serious about its wireless service.
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