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Covad’s no longer hard-wired

Latest LMDS deal demonstrates carrier’s broadband perspective

      

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.

Figure 1. Covad Wireless: Dedicated Fixed Wireless Broadband

“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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