In the nascent broadband wireless access market, Bellevue, Wash.-based Wavtrace Inc., which develops systems for millimeter-wave frequencies, believes it has a head start on the competition after unveiling its first product earlier this year.
Wavtrace’s first installation was for Virginia Tech, a university that won four local multipoint distribution services licenses at auction.
The company last week announced broadband wireless services company Formus Communications Inc. plans to install and test its Wavtrace PTM 1000 wireless broadband access system in Denver. The installation will mark the first use by Formus of a point-to-multipoint transmission system based on Time Division Duplexing technology, said the company.
Thomas van Overbeek, chief executive officer of Wavtrace, said TDD technology is uniquely suited to deliver data because it transmits and receives on a single channel and allows for more efficient use of spectrum.
“Data is growing at a rate of 100 percent per year,” said van Overbeek, describing the need for a technology that caters to the unique characteristics of data transmissions. “Voice is growing at 8 percent.
“Sometime this year data is going to surpass voice,” he continued. “It wouldn’t matter if voice and data had similar characteristics, but data traffic is asynchronous and bursty.
“Instead of a voice circuit-which is like a water system where there are two pipes-data is more like the fire department where you need a lot of resources all at once in a particular place,” he said.
Wavtrace claims its system can provide 40 percent greater data throughput than other systems.
The company considers the agreement with Formus a coup, because Formus has been aggressively acquiring broadband licenses throughout the world, including Germany, Poland, New Zealand, Argentina, Ecuador and Colombia.
“Wavtrace’s system neatly addresses the challenges created by spectrum allocations having been based on the incorrect assumption of predictable asymmetry of data traffic,” said Dr. Ray Nettleton, chief technology officer at Formus. “Wavtrace’s system allows all capacity to be used in either the forward or reverse direction and to be dynamically allocated based on the bandwidth demand of subscribers.”
The Wavtrace PTM 1000 product includes the hub and remote indoor and outdoor units, TDD air link technology and Simple Network Management Protocol-compatible network management software. The company’s first product releases are based on a symmetrical link, said van Overbeek, but future product releases will be adaptable.
“Customers first wanted a reliable link,” he said.
Wavtrace’s first customer shipments are scheduled for August, and it expects commercial deployments will increase next year.
