Fibertower owns a lot of the LMDS spectrum that they acquired when they bought First Avenue Networks. First Avenue acquired the spectrum which was the old WinStar and Teligent stuff. From what I understand there are still a few people who have warehouses of that old equipment. Fibertower was in the business of leasing that spectrum but they stopped. I tried to negotiate a deal when I was at EarthLink to do a nationwide lease with them. They have both 24 and 39 GHz spectrum with the 39 being almost nationwide http://www.fibertower.com/corp/solutions-spectrum.shtml. The problem with this spectrum is available equipment. For the EarthLink deal the plan was to use the 24 GHz spectrum. Japan Radio Corp (JRC) has a PTMP solution with CPE's in a form factor very similar in size to Canopy. We would have gone through the FCC cert process for those if the rest of the deal had gone through. While we were talking Fibertower did a 180 and said they weren't going to look at leasing anymore. My thought was they got greedy and figured if EarthLink was going to be able to do it, they should do it themselves. Didn't pan out for them though. There are still many private LMDS licenses that could probably be bought or leased cheaply. With no equipment available that spectrum has lost it's value. I'm sure JRC would spin up some product if the market showed some interest. Maybe with the new map other manufactures could be encouraged to do so as well. I don't recall any of the product details or the throughput but those are the places I would start on this quest. I think this is a great idea and one which should be pursued. It would be great to show the government that WISP's will make the most of of whatever is at hand and make it a profitable growing business, nit just speculate on spectrum to resell or to build up a marginal business and position it to sell (Nextel anyone...). I'm really getting tired of the "Flip this House" mentality in the licensed wireless world. Artificially inflated financials with very few who have actually proven their own business plan before they sell it to the next sucker (Sprint anyone...)... I could rant for a long time on the issue but I'll spare everyone. As difficult as it is to deal in unlicensed spectrum, it has some serious advantages. As long as you play within the rules there aren't big players and government always trying to create winners and losers. With unlicensed you can quietly go about building an industry and go undetected (like the WISP industry if you look at congress today). Maybe it's time to get creative and do something with free space optics and 60 GHz to build up some sort of PTMP solution? Today you know there are certain spectrum bands you have access to right now. You don't need to wait for the winds of political change to gain access. While working towards WISP protected spectrum is a good thing, it's just as smart to focus efforts on the bird in hand. Look at White Spaces. They have pushed that off till June. It will be nice when it's available but don't hold your breath or your innovation waiting for it. Create innovation now with what we have. This stuff won't be sub $100 CPE's. There is not enough manufacturing scale to do so but the costs required to do this with subsidized efforts by the government might make it cheaper than one thinks. This probably won't work for the extreme rural areas where the household density make it hard to justify much of any technology and still make a profit, but looking at the WISP map I see we have many operators who easily live in densely populated areas to justify projects such as this. I saw it's time for innovation. NEVER say NEVER when it comes to technology. Almost always you will be proven wrong in time, I know I have been on a number of things.
Thank You, Brian Webster -----Original Message----- From: motorola-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:motorola-boun...@wispa.org]on Behalf Of Gino Villarini Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 11:34 AM To: Motorola Canopy User Group Cc: WISPA General List Subject: [Motorola II] Thinking out of the box ... Gigabit PTMP? Today i have been pondering the idea to provide a wireless alternative to FTTH... At least a short range (up to 1 mile) 100 - 500 mbps wireless PTMP system to the home to provide triple play services. With todays current products, I ll say it cant be done... but is there an alterenative? Couple of ideas came in to my mind ... Rebirth of LMDS? AFAIK LMDS has not had great success on the states, spectrum was bidded, some gear was tested... no big networks were built ...but all this was almost 10 years ago, with today technology could a cost effective platform be developed to provide GIgabit PTMP on LMDS? MIMO Radio + 256qam + big spectrum means big bandwidth PTMP 24 ghz? Could a PTMP UL 24 ghz be developed? upconvert and bond multiple 802.11n based links with a polling mac? Anyone would like to add something? Gino A. Villarini g...@aeronetpr.com Aeronet Wireless Broadband Corp. tel 787.273.4143 fax 787.273.4145 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
