Nokia Aims Airheads at Home Wireless
By Jeanie Stokes
from the April 16, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
First, there were point-to-point solutions for fixed wireless broadband. Then, point-to-multipoint appeared. Now, along comes Nokia Inc., offering a multipoint-to-multipoint "mesh network" solution it is touting for bringing high-speed Internet to the residential market.
The heart of Nokia's rooftop networking system is a wireless router that combines 802.11 radio frequency technology and omni-directional antenna equipped with Nokia's air operating system--special software that solves some of the line-of-sight problems experienced by fixed wireless systems that depend on a direct wireless link between a base station and a customer's transponder.
"Because it's an IP router, it will route traffic for neighboring nodes," says Lauren Hipp, head of wireless routing marketing and sales for Nokia Networks. "It solves the coverage problem inherent for residential wireless broadband. Now you only need very short links. You only need to get a connection from your house to a neighboring node, or preferably several nearby nodes, so you have lots of different paths."
Fixed wireless access has been slow to take off in North America, largely because of factors Nokia hopes to address with its system: costs of deployment, such as equipment, spectrum and antenna roof space, and the necessity of having a direct or near line of sight from the customer to the network base station.
AT&T Wireless, Sprint and a variety of smaller startup providers are offering residential fixed wireless broadband access in relatively limited markets, primarily using FCC-licensed spectrum.
Nokia says its rooftop system is aimed at neighborhoods with clusters of homes in a two-mile to three-mile radius that aren't reachable by other high-speed solutions, such as digital subscriber line or cable modems.
Only one neighborhood unit--which Nokia, believe it or not, calls the airhead--needs a link to the base station. Each subsequent node becomes part of the infrastructure, spreading out access in a mesh, much like the architecture of World Wide Web.
"Now your antennas are simply your neighbors," Hipp says. "If the link gets blocked, it figures it out and says, 'I'll go this way.'"
Every time another customer is added, that helps build out the network. Rather than having to shell out infrastructure costs up front, the wireless service provider can generate revenue each time it adds a new antenna.
The average cost to put a house on the network is as low as $700 to $750. Nokia, which is manufacturing its own consumer premise units in the United States, expects to drive down the price over time.
The maximum reach on the omnidirectional antennas in each unit is up to 2 miles, but customers in most neighborhoods would require a link of only about a quarter-mile or less. The system offers more efficient use of power and spectrum than other types of wireless transmissions, Hipp says. "You only need as much power as is required to close the link." That minimizes interference and allows reuse of the radio spectrum over and over again.
With point-to-multipoint systems, the antenna must be high enough to travel longer distances. That exposes the signal to possible interference in clear airspace over distances up to 35 miles. Nokia's roofline system is designed to operate in unlicensed frequencies (2.4 GHz), where interference could be a problem in a conventional wireless system.
"Just above the roofline, you have a lot of protection from the clutter around you. The trees, homes that create line-of-sight problems become your friends, from an interference perspective, because they attenuate other signals," Hipp says.
Nokia's rooftop system has been commercially deployed at two locations in California. Advanced Telecom Group in Santa Rosa provides a combination of wired and wireless voice and data services. The other is Meer.net, a regional Internet service provider (ISP) based in Mountain View.
(insert pending ATG comment here)
Nokia's rooftop network is a shared network, bringing latency with each hop. That's where the unique operating software comes into play. It lets carriers allocate bandwidth among customers who need it rather than assigning a dedicated amount to each subscriber.
"You can sell different levels of service and throttle people back. It keeps one person from being able to hog the network. You may start with baseline service that lets you sell 256k or 386k of service and then software lets you keep the person at that average rate," Hipp says. The carrier also could sell bursts of service for fast downloads, or offer a more expensive, faster service to meet a particular market demand.
"On the fixed wireless side, although we love our DSLAMs, there's about 40 percent of customers that (carriers) aren't able to reach. This is a very cost-effective way to actually do that. And time effective," says John Ferrari, senior director for worldwide marketing of Nokia's Broadband Systems unit.
ATG, for example, began marketing Nokia's roofline networking in an area that had no broadband services of any kind and got a 15 percent take rate. The time from marketing to network deployment was less than 30 days, Hipp says. The system also eliminates the costly and time-consuming need to secure rooftop rights and install expensive central switching office equipment.
Advanced solutions may be just what's needed to boost mass market deployments of fixed wireless service.
AT&T Wireless, for example, so far has signed up 10,000 customers for the Digital Broadband fixed wireless product it has offered in two markets since last year. That's expected to grow to about 100,000 customers in about 15 markets by year-end.
The company scaled back plans to be in 40 markets by the close of 2002 in order to concentrate on market profitability, but still is spending about $450 million on Digital Broadband this year, says spokesman David Hale. Fixed wireless "will be around for some time. It's the most cost-efficient way to provide high-speed Internet access to a customer," Hale says. AT&T is targeting residential consumers and bundling the broadband product with its local telephone service.
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