MONTEREY, Calif.-Aeris Communications Inc. said its MicroBurst technology now covers the whole of North America and is ready for commercial service.
At the WirelessDeveloper ’99 conference last week, Aeris announced coverage pacts with Orbcomm Global L.P., and with cellular carriers, whose control channels transmit mobile and fixed wireless data applications based on the MicroBurst technology.
While negotiating the various carrier agreements needed to fill out its terrestrial coverage is noteworthy, it is the hybrid agreement with Orbcomm that Aeris finds most compelling. According to the company, it is the first hybrid cellular control channel/satellite network agreement for data services.
Aeris spent the last several years quietly building its system, but the company said it is ready to start making some noise, with the belief it is the leader in a segment that potentially could propel the wireless data industry to new heights.
“Now is the time for us to stand up and tell the full story of Aeris, what the vision is and what it is trying to accomplish,” said Dick Gossen, Aeris president and chief executive officer. “What we are working on … will soon be recognized as one of the largest segments in the wireless industry.”
While the wireless data industry continues to tout the many advances it has made in the last year toward customer acceptance, lack of ubiquitous coverage remains a factor for many. Aeris believes it has solved that problem by employing Orbcomm’s low-earth-orbit satellite data network.
“The two networks together make more sense than separately,” Gossen said. While both networks have significant strengths of their own, he said the two complement each others’ weaknesses.
Orbcomm’s satellite network is hard to match in terms of coverage, but has limited in-building penetration and can fade out in urban centers where there is no direct line of sight between the receiver and the satellite.
While the terrestrial MicroBurst network has superior urban coverage and penetration, it is lacking in the more remote areas where it is needed for many of the tracking and monitoring applications it hopes to attract.
The two networks are joined by a multinetwork gateway designed by Orbcomm, which integrates with both Mobitex and Global System for Mobile communications networks.
People using the hybrid Aeris/Orbcomm network will have devices that automatically switch between Aeris coverage and Orbcomm coverage, depending on which is cheaper and available at any given time. So the customer has two networks, but one interface.
“This is an example of the power of footprint,” Gossen said, adding that Aeris’ business plan contained several challenges that magnify what the entire data industry faces, specifically-coverage.
“The cellular industry believes 94 percent coverage is good enough because cellular is an adjunct to landline. You don’t need it everywhere, just where the major markets are,” Gossen said. “But that’s a different phenomenon than for the wireless data industry at large. That view is that ubiquity of coverage is everything.
“You have to convince the customer to become dependent on the applications, and to do so, you have got to have coverage everywhere … In order for technology to be a major market phenomenon, you need deployment by major market leaders.”
One example highlighting the problem is the security alarm industry. Only 1 percent of security alarm systems are wireless, even though the wireless option is safer. The reason, Gossen said, is because existing wireless alarm options are missing one of three important criteria.
First, a wireless monitoring system must be low cost. Second, coverage must be ubiquitous. Third, it must be fully mobile and enable auto-roaming.
Security companies ship their products into multitier distribution channels, where the product can end up anywhere and sold by anyone, Gossen said. Therefore a wireless solution must not only be able to work everywhere, but be configured in such a way that any carrier in the area can employ it without even the most basic of intercepts.
For instance, cellular coverage is quite widespread and plenty of roaming agreements exist. If a customer is roaming in an area where the licensed cellular carrier has no roaming agreement with the user’s provider, the user will have to enter a credit-card number in order to roam. People generally will put up with that type of interception for the convenience of making a call.
But machines cannot, and those selling and distributing these machines will not support multiple transport technologies. They want one solution that works everywhere.
So when carriers say their networks are everywhere, Gossen says “not everywhere enough.”
The greatest challenge Aeris faced in creating a system that was “everywhere enough,” was to convince terrestrial cellular carriers to incorporate the MicroBurst technology based on the types of users it would attract, Gossen said. So Aeris had to find potential customers to show carriers the level of interest that existed for them to agree.
At the same time, these potential customers did not want to commit to any new system without assurances the coverage was going to be there, so Aeris had to find carriers to show potential customers the degree of coverage it would be able to deliver.
Gossen had to convince market leaders and carriers to come to the same table using each other as bait, without having either, like building the frame of a house and the foundation at the same time, rather than one after another.
“We’ve built the first full duplex ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ market paradigm in the history of the industry,” Gossen said, laughing. “We started with nothing. We didn’t even have office space. We were here operating out of our homes.”
But the network now is complete and about 5,000 units are activated. Gossen said he expects to add up to 15,000 units a month. He also expects as many as 200 developers to create further applications for the system in coming months.
