Sprint Entices Wireless B-band Customers

Jim Barthold

When it comes to hooking up customers for its broadband fixed wireless high-speed data services, Sprint has no low gear. The company is in installation overdrive in Tucson, AZ., Phoenix, Detroit, Colorado Springs and recently Houston, with five to seven more marks planned before the end of the year.

"It's working out great," says Russ Robinson, Sprint's National Consumer Organization director. "In (first markets) Phoenix and Tucson we're approaching 10,000 customers, and we haven't really actively marketed it yet."

Sprint is exceeding promised average downstream data rates of 1 megabit per second and upstream of 256 kilobits per second, says Michael Greenbaum, president/CEO of modem/headend equipment supplier Hybrid Networks.

There is, he says "an extraordinary amount of capacity available at the average customer site. Sprint did some measurements of this in Phoenix, and they were getting results of 1.2 megabits per second on average per customer, with burst speeds between 4 and 5 megabits."

Uniquely, Sprint targets residential users with a $39.95 per month service, going contrary to what many industry watchers predicted as a wireless quick-hit strategy to target small business parks and ignore residences.

"There are some analysts who have voiced that opinion, but why?" Robinson wonders. "In many cases the (residential) cable plant isn't built out to handle the Internet, and you know the limitations of DSL (digital subscriber line). We find people coming to us and saying `I'm not in a service area right now.' Those are definitely a target for us."

Sprint is also getting veteran subscribers who "are frustrated with their current experience," Robinson says.

Perhaps the most daunting task facing Sprint's rollout is reducing installation times. While competitive with DSL, Sprint's installations still lag behind cable.

"We're working on some things," says Greenbaum, such as a second-generation modem that "has more equalization and therefore does a better job of multipathing and will be reducing the amount of installation burden."

Also expected to help is installation training from antenna supplier California Amplifier.

"It's just different installation crews who are going out there adapting to the nuances of the environment as far as where it (antenna) gets mounted, things like that," says Kris Kelkar, Cal Amp's video products group VP.

Every little bit helps.

"We're getting it down," Robinson says, admitting that installation times still run from 1 to 3 hours, slower than cable but better than DSL, where "you have to go out and condition the lines and hook it up to the DSLAM and make all those things work," he adds. "We don't bring all that baggage with us."

Sprint's cellular tower infrastructure helps because these towers can - and will - see double duty as fixed wireless antenna platforms.

"We start with one tower and put antennas on these towers and just point them down into the communities we want to serve," Robinson says. "We get about a 35-mile radius from the tower."

Mountainous locations such as Tucson, Phoenix and Colorado Springs are even better because the towers can be placed up high in a supercell configuration that feeds up to 25,000 customers.

"If you want to bring on more customers or increase your speed, you build a second tower," he says.

For now, Sprint relies on line-of-sight delivery. Phil Cox, Cal Amp's wireless products group VP, won't predict when that might change. Industry groups are working on multipath and vectorization strategies to remove that obstacle.

"What we're doing for the future is something that we keep highly classified," he says.

Hybrid's a little less cautious.

"We're working on a few things," says Greenbaum. "We have another modem coming out in our market plan that not only will do the line-of-sight capability, but will do some near-line-of-sight as well, beginning next year."

That product migration follows an in-dustry trend to migrate antennas to the desktop.

"We're looking at the other architectures," Robinson says. "The great thing about it is we can get around line-of-sight issues, and it greatly increases our coverage."

Sprint's other bonus is a services bundle of high-speed broadband wireless services with its existing long-distance and cellular offerings.

Although it has no plans as yet, "We're looking at bundles all across the enterprise," Robinson says.

While concentrating on residential, Sprint, Robinson adds, is not ignoring the commercial market.

"We're seeing a lot of responses from small businesses who move a surprisingly large amount of data," he says. "The engineers have projected that when our patterns of traffic are mature, we'll probably be 80% consumer and 20% business, but the traffic (data usage) traffic pattern will be pretty much 50-50."

Sprint is, finally, ready to go just one more step in the broadband wireless arena.

"We are doing voice-over-IP (Internet Protocol) trials, and we do plan, long-term, to be able to offer a voice service over this as well," Robinson says.