Fixed Wireless Business

Broadband Comes to Coffman Cove — continued

But some residents had seen something better. A Massachusetts company hired locals to do medical transcription work online. They researched broadband solutions to connect them to their employer and eventually brought in service from satellite Internet company StarBand Communications Inc. of McLean, Va.

In the course of doing that research, they had come in contact with another service provider, later acquired by SkyFrames. When a core group of residents decided late last year to try and "do something for the community," as Price puts it, and bring in broadband service, they found an enthusiastic ally in Ed Buxtel.

The first attempt to get the council interested in the project in February ended with a request for more information and some proof the community was interested. At the next meeting in March, most of the town turned out and the motion carried with ease. The money would come from federal relief funds allocated to the community in the aftermath of the shut-down of the logging industry in 2000.

SkyFrames sold Coffman Cove a VSAT terminal, dish and gateway device. VSAT—Very Small Aperture Terminal—is a 20-year-old satellite technology that provides service at much lower cost than older technologies. The terminal will deliver a near-T-1 (1.55 Mbps) connection.

SkyFrames also sold the town a turn-key wireless hotspot system from Baldwin Park, Calif.-based Raylink Inc. Coffman Cove is small enough that a single access point will cover it all, with flat-panel rooftop transceivers at each subscriber's home connecting them.

Both the SkyFrames VSAT gear and the Raylink wireless system make it possible for much of the network monitoring and maintenance to be done remotely by SkyFrames from Costa Mesa. When the company comes in June to install the network it will also train the town's three part-time employees on how to operate the network and the business.

Thanks to proprietary SkyFrames technology that improves the efficiency of dividing up the bandwidth from the satellite link, the Coffman Cove WISP will be able to deliver subscribers an asynchronous connection of 128 Kbps upstream and up to 1 Mbps downstream. Price expects downstream throughput will top out at around 440 Kbps.

The price to subscribers had not been finally set at the time of writing, but will likely be $35 a month, Price says. The highest it might go is $45. Thirty-four residents have already signed up. Another 11 with computers probably will, and more are considering buying computers and hooking up.

The service won't just break the isolation of Coffman Cove. "We think it could have some substantial economic impact," Price says. "More and more jobs are available over the Internet now. The medical transcription work has been successful here. If people could work at home, that would encourage more of them to enter the workforce."

A few businesses may be able to exploit the Internet too. Boutique logging operations could market select lumber over the Internet. The community is also trying to raise funds to build and operate a fish processing plant. If that comes to pass, the company would retail product in small quantities on the Net.

"Ten fish to this reunion, five to that wedding—that type of distribution," Price explains. "The Internet would be a major marketing tool. We're looking at selling to all of the continental United States, especially anywhere Alaska Airlines flies."

Of course, this is all in the future. Still, things are looking up in Coffman Cove. Soon it will be abandoning the diesel generators that provide its electricity as it hooks into a regional power grid. That will reduce power bills by a factor of three—which might encourage residents to use computers more.

And broadband is coming.

—End

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