Fixed Wireless Business

Wholesale Models for Broadband Wireless — continued

Its all about the partner
First Avenue believes it can offer service levels that give partners real advantages. Its service levels include 2 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, and up to 108 Mbps. However, it adds burst rates of 5 GHz, 10 GHz, 20 GHz and more for each service level.

"We guarantee a committed rate for our partners," said Olsen. "But we apply a Maximum burst rate on top of that to assist with peaks."

First Avenue is focused on a specific type of partner that it believes it can serve uniquely.

"We look for partners in a city who have an existing relationship with end user customers and a sales force to market to them," said Olsen. "We are shooting for a pure business to business model where our partner owns the customer."

Olsen adds that the company would talk to startups. However, it prefers companies with existing customer bases. The company seems most interested in working with multiple partners in each market, but might focus on one partner if that partner were strong enough.

"Our ideal partner already has access to fiber that allows us to build multiple nodes consisting of four ninety degree sectors off of," said Olsen. "If there is no existing linkup we would do a complete radio ring around the area."

First Avenue or the partner can pay for rooftop rights. First Avenue will assist in tower negotiations in either case.

First Avenue Network's preference is to reach the building rooftop and then serve the customers within (for the partner) without going through the building manager to do so.

"Our model is to only provision customers when an order is placed," explained Olsen. "We would either provision through a window or wire CAT-5 from the roof."

First Avenue has some additional capabilities that led it to offer especially robust services.

Full service or bust
First Avenue holds a detailed building database of the top 40 cities in the U.S. It combines this with mapping technology to create network designs that it then field verifies for each partner.

This capability, coupled with its maintenance people's feet on the ground, allows it to actually do end user provisioning for its partner in some instances.

"In some markets our partners use their own installers," said Olsen. "In others we do it for them or contract with third parties to complete installs."Olsen envisions a future level of service where partners could choose to build off the edge of its metro networks with other longer range WiMax-type radios to offer distributed service in suburban markets or nearby towns.

So we have seen one premier service model designed for high bandwidth customers. How might a telecom with electrical utility roots look at a similar service? It turns out there are both similarities and differences.