Wireless Cowboys

At the October 2024 Calix Connections conference, Calix CEO Michael Weening declared “the era of speed is over” – saying that no one needs a gig and that Internet Service Providers needed to transition into Experience Providers.    I am in full agreement that the era of speed is over and that no one needs a gig.   I also agree that it is important to provide broadband customers with a great experience.   But I see these revelations from a little different perspective.   

It is interesting to see the transition from “speeds” to “experience” that is going on in the fiber broadband world.  Took them long enough!   Most WISPs have been focused on doing this for years, with a much more personalized focus on the customers and communities that they serve and attention to what the customers are wanting.    At first, we followed demand and just getting service established was the priority, but if you want to keep those customers you have to make sure that the service is reliable and that their services work the way that they expect them to.   Many years ago we determined that tremendous value was gained by spending extra time with the end users during installs and service calls to ensure they were having a good experience.  That is the cornerstone of good customer service and should always be the priority over extra services.

Weening goes on to talk about the need to protect customers from threats.   We agree on that, but the implementation goes in a very different direction.   He is talking about cyberprotection services getting added to connections and even highlights one provider that requires an “opt-out” to have cybersecurity services not added.    It is an interesting approach and it is no coincidence that it just happens to correlate with the services available on their platform.   Our primary form of cybersecurity goes back to the very beginning of our network setup, when we put our customers on CG-NAT, which blocks the vast majority of remote cyberattack incursions at the edge of our network and has kept our customers safe for 20+ years.    We do offer public IPv4 and IPv6 for the customers that need them, but CGNAT has been one of the easiest and most effective ways of protecting customers from direct attacks.    And we have been using best-in-breed Quality Of Experience appliances for several years to assure the best broadband experience to our customers.   WISPs have always valued the need to optimize network performance-that is how we continue to grow and thrive in places where the experts said that fixed wireless would never be competitive.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for giving the customer what they want, but we have had very little request for the kind of services some of these companies are pushing.    Marketing applications get really annoying to end users – do we really need more “targeted marketing campaigns and personalized offers”.    No thanks.   Applications that use “real-time network data” sounds like a different way of saying “we are real-time mining your customers data and usage habits.”      

The most important experience?   Paying an appropriate price for a reliable connection that meets the needs of the customer.   The biggest reason for the growth in fixed wireless access is because the average cost per connection for fiber and cable providers continues to rise and the push for better experience is to justify those cost increases.    The ultimate goal – $150/month subscriptions.    Doubling ARPU sounds like a great experience for the provider – not such a great experience for the customer!

The “experts” keep pushing the message that we have digital divides and need to spend billions on more fiber because if it isn’t fiber it isn’t broadband – but more customers are voting for fixed wireless because it gets the job done and doesn’t come with a $150/month price tag.          

I like to read a lot of content with different perspectives about the broadband industry to understand what people are thinking and make sure that my own viewpoints can be sharpened up. It is refreshing to read something that challenges my views and makes me want to reconsider what I’m thinking.

However, once in a while I come across something so far off-base and uninformed that it makes me want to throw things at my monitor. This has happened a lot lately when I read Doug Dawson’s blog about “Broadband for All” and he talks about fixed wireless. His latest post about “Fixed Wireless in Cities” pushed my button, and instead of destroying my monitor, I decided to destroy his arguments.

Here goes….

First, Doug states that licensed spectrum can provide better broadband results. This is not the case. Unlicensed spectrum is more accessible and there are a myriad of options available that make it more useful to deliver high capacity and reliable broadband than licensed spectrum. The latest generation of PTMP fixed wireless platforms like Tarana and mmWave fixed wireless are two pieces of fixed wireless tech that refute the licensed spectrum argument. The owners of licensed spectrum don’t want to hear this because it devalues the spectrum that they have spent billions on so they can control it.

Second, line of sight is a consideration for wireless but can be worked around in a citywide environment, especially if the city has full control over key infrastructure elements such as street lights and utility poles. Towers are not necessary when rooftops, street lights and utility poles are available to supplement coverage when needed.

Third, fixed wireless is great for multi-tenant buildings as Google and others have proven. It requires a good connection to the building and use of the internal building infrastructure to distribute to tenants, but the model is proven and works well.

Finally, a good fixed wireless system that is professionally installed doesn’t have to deal with “dead spots” like the mobile and self-install FWA systems used by cell carriers. A professionally done fixed wireless installation has more capacity, higher reliability and a known level of quality than mobile or self-installed systems.

The real bottom line is that there are serious issues with using a fiber-only approach for citywide networks that make them a risky investment. The cost, long time of deployment and long term push toward a monopolistic competitive environment with fiber-only networks puts a heavy burden on taxpayers and forces communities that are currently suffering from accessibility or affordability issues to wait even longer for a solution.

Do better, Doug.

Saying that 2020 has been a rollercoaster is probably an understatement. Covid-19 threw the entire world into a panic and the repercussions of its effects on our lives will be with us for decades. In many ways, it forced us to look at different ways to do things and put several technologies on fast forward while putting a hard stop to many things that we took for granted would always be available to us.

The importance of reliable and capable broadband went right to the forefront of issues to deal with. People working from home, students learning from home and everyone trying to stay occupied during quarantine events increased the load on broadband networks 25-50% at different times during the day. Moderate peak hour increases were exceeded by huge increases in demand during daytime hours as more people were using home connections. Any providers that had not been diligent in upgrading their network started to see minor issues turn into bigger ones overnight.

At Vistabeam, several major upgrades had just been completed before Covid hit and we were able to meet the demand. Even after shutting down installs for a period in March, we were met with record demand for new service throughout the rest of the spring and into the summer. As we scaled up to meet the demand, CARES Act funded broadband grant programs were established in Nebraska and Wyoming and we responded with the intention of getting as much high capacity broadband as possible into the areas of those states that we could deliver it to. By mid October, we were as busy as we had ever been, even after onboarding 16 new employees since the beginning of the year.

Then, Covid-19 hit our area. After a relatively uneventful summer and start to the school year with few cases in our region, it took off. I went from not knowing anyone who had it to knowing 20+ people that had it within a week. As we implemented work from home policies and curtailed field work, it was clear that we were not going to be immune from the negative effects of the pandemic.

Our country and world will not be the same, but I hope we are able to figure out positive ways to get through these challenges. This has been a rough year, but humans are resilient and capable and we will figure out how to make the best out of a difficult situation.

It is still in progress, but I finally broke the six months of writers block and got in a solid three hours of writing tonight to catch up with the book timeline and fill in a few things I had bypassed.

Just to show that I have actually written something, here is an excerpt. Thanks for reading!

Wireless Cowboys Chapter 4: Wireless Pioneers

I was late.

It was 7:15am on Saturday morning, when my phone rang. Groggy and tired from being out until 3am at a band gig the night before, I picked up the phone. Monique Ellert, a very sharp co-worker who had been accompanying me on sales visits around the region, was on the line.

“I am sitting here at the Log Cabin with Gordie, and we are wondering if you are planning to join us.”

I had completely blown off the meeting. Thankfully, I had asked Monique to come along and she was making up for my failures at the moment.

“Tell him I will get there as soon as I can.”

I threw on some clothes, jumped in the car and headed for town.

The Log Cabin is a rustic, old-school restaurant, located in Gering, Nebraska, sitting astride the original Oregon Trail. The scene that morning was a typical Saturday morning at any rural gathering spot. Farmers and ranchers were sitting at their tables drinking black coffee, talking about the weather and poking at greasy portions of breakfast food.

I walked in about 7:45 and spotted Gordie and Monique. Gordie Wilkins was a big man, slightly red-faced and gregarious with a big smile and a welcoming demeanor. Monique was at the table with him, the picture of sharp professionalism, with her hair pulled back and a look of disdain on her face when she saw my condition.

I was a wreck. I was wearing wrinkled clothes picked up off the floor, my hair was an unruly mop and I smelled like a combination of stale beer and cigarettes. I had a splitting headache and sad-sack attitude to go along with my disheveled appearance. As I sat down and took off my battered black leather jacket, Gordie chuckled and made light of my sad condition. I grabbed a cup of coffee and did my best to pull things together.

The meeting was in late 1999, and I was not in a good place. I felt like I was on the wrong side of several trends. Our base of dialup customers was still growing, but the growth rate had tapered off as Sprint and Qwest started to turn up DSL service in our service areas. We did have a few DSL customers in three towns in our service area, but Qwest blocked us from their territory and Sprint had recently sent me notice that they were going to disconnect the copper circuits we had been using to deliver DSL service. Their prices for DSL also looked like a death sentence for dialup. Not very many people were going to want to spend $50/month for a phone line and $20/month for a 56kbs dialup account when they could get 384kbps DSL for the same price. What had started out as a great relationship between the ISPs and telephone companies was about to take a big turn against the ISPs, and my business was in a bad position.

I went through my litany of problems for a while until Gordie stopped me. He told us about a friend who had been diagnosed with cancer and only had a short time to live. From that perspective, my problems didn’t seem like very much to worry about. “Your problems can be solved,” he said and that finally brought me out of my self-induced pity party. I stopped complaining and talking about my problems and started to ask him questions.

Gordie had been referred to me as someone who knew a lot about wireless technology, long range microwave connections in particular. He was a microwave tech at KN Energy, an energy company that maintained a massive gas pipeline structure across the Western United States. In addition to their pipelines, they also had a very sophisticated telecommunications network that ran on microwave connections and was not dependent on wireline or cellular telephone networks. Early on, KN had approached the phone companies to deliver 56k and T1 facilities to their pipeline stations, but the cost of lines to the remote locations was very high and the service was so unreliable that KN made the decision to build their own network.

KN had microwave towers at many of their pipeline stations and at strategic points between stations, and the segment that passed through Gering ended up in Casper, Wyoming on one side and Denver on the other. Typically the towers were 25-30 miles apart, as going longer distances made it harder to maintain a reliable connection. Gordie was an old-timer, a veteran who had been taking care of the systems since they first came online, climbing towers when needed and doing the repair work and equipment swaps as needed to keep the network operational.

KN was also partnered up with Metricom to offer the Ricochet wireless service. Although the consumer side of the Ricochet system was appealing and inexpensive, the back end technology was cumbersome and costly, funneling all user traffic back through a series of gateways and backbone connections to a single access gateway in Silicon Valley. For all of its limitations, the Ricochet system was pretty cool and people in Western Nebraska liked it. It made me think that maybe there was another way to use wireless to deliver Internet to end users. The phone companies were going to take away our ability to offer DSL and it was a matter of time before they took away our dialup customers. Was there a way to bypass the phone companies and offer something affordable and fast enough to compete with DSL?

In my desperation to find something other than DSL that could deliver high speed Internet to our customers, I had come across the ISP-Wireless mailing list, which was populated by people who were experimenting with wireless Internet. On a whim, I called one of the most active in the group, a fellow by the name of Marlon Schaefer, and asked him a few questions. He basically said to get some equipment and try it out and recommended a vendor called Teletronics. A couple of weeks before the meeting with Gordie, I had received a box that contained a 2.4ghz 802.11 access point, a couple of PCMCIA wireless cards an omni antenna and a grid antenna. I set it up and it was pretty cool to connect up to my network at 1Mbps speeds without a wire, but my excitement was short lived. I left the building with my laptop and wireless card to see how far away I could get and the signal was gone once I got a few feet outside of the building. I just couldn’t see how I could build a business model around this technology. I was frustrated, and that is why I had setup this meeting with Gordie in the first place.

Monique gave me a couple of Excedrin and I started to feel better. We finished up breakfast and went to my office to look at the equipment and draw on the white board. Gordie gave me a very basic primer on how microwave works, and Monique and I started to sketch out some ideas on how we might be able to use this technology to deliver high speed Internet to our customers.