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Mobile & Wireless
Covad’s no longer hard-wired
Latest LMDS deal demonstrates carrier’s broadband perspective
by Jim Barthold
Covad Communications is serious about being seen as a
broadband provider, not just another commercial CLEC.
Besides developing a bonded T1 offering that jacks bandwidth
to 3 Mbps for its core commercial customer base, Covad has
taken another big step into the wireless realm by leasing
LMDS spectrum from IDT for a San Francisco Bay-area
offering. It has a similar arrangement with Nextlink in
Southern California.
“We’ve been in this business a few years now and nobody
thinks of us as a wireless player,” said David McMorrow,
general manager of Covad Wireless. “All this really does is
change the underlying technology a little bit on our end, but
from the customer’s point of view, all they know is they’re
getting Hi-Cap (High Capacity) services from Covad in two
weeks instead of six weeks.”
That, even McMorrow admits, is an oversimplification. While
the carrier can bond two T1 lines for a faster business class
broadband connection, it can’t reach speeds like the top line
45 Mbps it can achieve with wireless and it can’t provision
services almost overnight for an impatient customer. It also
must continue working with LECs—never a pleasant or
inexpensive experience—for wireline connections while
wireless requires only a lease of 28-31 GHz LMDS spectrum
for point-to-multipoint data delivery.
“We’re able to do quicker installs and get better efficiencies
out of our operation,” said McMorrow.
Covad, which is really diversifying, is even going in the
opposite direction with a Wi-Fi mesh trial with the city of San
Carlos, Calif.
“We already serve the city with point-to-point and point-to-
multipoint services but these types of services don’t reach the
very small business very well,” McMorrow said. “We’re testing
Wi-Fi as a means to reach the very small businesses … fixed
locations that complement what we do with T1 and Hi-Cap
services.”
If all goes well with the fixed trial, Covad wants to try
portability.
It’s all for commercial services, he emphasized
because “we’re not necessarily interested in deploying to the
consumer or residential segment.”
Covad is interested in reaching commercial customers in
offices as small as 25-30 users to large enterprises as
inexpensively as possible. Wireless is quicker to deploy and
delivers more bandwidth but it comes with baggage, not the
least of which is just using something called LMDS which got a
very bad rep during the wireless rise and fall early this decade.
“We don’t position it at all as LMDS; we position it as Hi-Cap
standard,” McMorrow said.
LMDS is, he said, just a means to an end.
“The bandwidth utilization rates are going up significantly.
There was a time when I never thought a small business
would buy a T1; they’re all buying T1s now. The next thing
they want is two T1s, 6 megs, 20 megs,” he said.
Which, of course, plays into any kind of wireless play Covad
can develop.
“These services fit that middle to upper end of the SMB
(small-medium business) segment for sure,” McMorrow
said. “We’d like to use mesh as a means to get down to the
lower end of the small-medium business, avoiding the
residential market just because that’s a bloodbath down there
with prices and cable companies and all.”
And if existing wireline customers want to migrate to wireless,
Covad’s open to that as well, “but that’s more of a vision for
the future than we’re actively doing that,” he concluded.
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