Wireless Cowboys

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.

Over the last twenty years of working with Internet and related networks, I have observed many different usage patterns along with some interesting shifts in how people utilize their Internet connections. There are many peaks and valleys during the days and throughout the week, and one day of the year stands above all the rest when it comes to Internet usage. Here are some of my observations and a little bit of insight into what the future holds for Internet usage.

Back in the days of dialup Internet, the most important factor to look at for an Internet Service Provider was the number of modems available for each customer. The ratio of modems per customer was called the oversubscription ratio. On average, a good Internet provider would have five customers for each phone line. This worked because not everyone used Internet all of the time, and it helped to keep the cost of Internet subscriptions down. Typically, there were plenty of open modems until about 5pm. When people got home, they would get online between 7 and 10pm to use the Internet. This is called peak usage time. As the Internet became more popular and people spent more time online, the providers had to install more phone lines so that customers would not get busy signals during peak usage times.

Weather also plays a part in Internet usage. During the winter, people spend more time inside using their computer and Internet connection. On snow days, when kids are often home from school, Internet usage goes up even more. During the spring and summer, people spend less time on their computers and more time doing things outdoors.

Over time, dialup was replaced by broadband connections through cable, dsl, fiber and wireless. Broadband is always connected, and the oversubscription ratio shifted from the number of modems to the amount of bandwidth available for each user. Ten years ago, an oversubscription ratio of 10:1 was acceptable. This meant that for every one megabyte of capacity available, the provider could sell ten megabytes worth of connectivity. Between downloading webpages and emails, the Internet connection would sit empty. The peak usage timing was very similar to dialup, with the most usage happening between 7pm and 11pm. The busiest days of the week were Sunday through Wednesday, with less usage on Thursday through Saturday as people spent more time doing other things during the weekend.

Over the last few years, the growing popularity of online video services like Netflix has forced major changes in how Internet providers build their networks. Video uses the entire Internet connection and stays connected for a long time. Average data usage has skyrocketed and is on pace to double every twelve months. Our target oversubscription ratio is now 4:1 or less. The shift from TV time to Internet video time in many households has also shifted peak usage. Peak hours run from 4pm to midnight, and Friday through Monday nights are now the peak days.

The longest day of the year for Internet providers is Christmas Day. This is the day when the Internet hits the highest traffic point of the year. Christmas Day is the perfect storm of Internet usage – cold weather, kids are home from school, there is nothing to watch on TV and the house is full of new electronic devices and video games that need to download updates from the Internet. The usage peak from Christmas typically isn’t seen again for a few months, but it serves as the measuring point for how well a network handles heavy loads.

All of us at Vistabeam send you wishes for a great Holiday Season!