NEW YORK-Teligent Inc., Vienna, Va., has found a way to bend radio signals around buildings, dramatically enlarging its actual footprint without much additional network infrastructure.
The fixed wireless carrier has nine months left on an exclusive one-year contract with Remec, a San Diego company that developed the repeater technology to achieve this feat, said Michael Kraft, senior vice president of investor relations.
“It’s a repeater for line-of-sight that bends the signal around a building and can increase the footprint from seeing 70 percent of the building to 90 percent,” Kraft said at Shorecliff Communications Inc.’s Broadband Wireless Technology Investment Symposium.
“New radios are (also) coming on line … We are just seeing the beginning of innovations because more people are focused on fixed wireless than ever before, and no one company can serve all the needs of all the carriers in all the countries.”
Three years ago, Teligent paid $25,000 to gain the equivalent of four T1 connections, transmission links each with a capacity of 1,544 megabits per second. Two years ago, the same sum acquired the equivalent of eight T1s. Today, that amount buys a D3 equivalent.
Those declining costs are even more significant when compared with customer price expectations.
“We have found in focus groups that potential customers are suspicious of poor quality if our services are discounted too much,” Kraft said.
Teligent also is using newly available technology to boost its position in providing backhaul services.
“Everyone is focused on serving the [end user], but this year we are building a node to our central office for fixed wireless backhaul for us, other companies and other carriers,” he said.
Within a year, Teligent estimates 20 percent to 30 percent of its revenues could come from backhaul.
Teligent, in business to solve the so-called last-mile bottleneck in telecommunications, has faced a human factor speed bump in deploying the advanced technologies that promise to improve its delivery of services.
“This is a new industry, and on average, the in-house technical expertise is not there. There is no depth of experience in fixed wireless,” Kraft said.
“This has slowed up and messed up deployment. We’ve had a number of installations go out (of service) because of poor deployment. But our training is improving.”
The company projects that industrywide revenues from U.S. fixed wireless services will total about $820 million this year, rising to $5.2 billion by the end of 2003. That is a tidy sum to divide among just four fixed wireless carriers, Kraft said.
While large corporations are eager for more and faster data capabilities, “we see the small and medium-size business markets still in dial-up (modem) stage, for the most part,” he said.
“With [Internet Protocol] and IP over [Asynchronous Transfer Mode] coming, there is convergence of voice and data. We’re all focused on data hype, but the reality is voice. What the customers pick up is a handset. What they want to buy is voice, regardless of how it’s delivered.
“If you can get in today with voice, you can grow into data with those customers.”
