Fixed Wireless Equipment

Motorola to WISPs: We Get It

Sure, the core of the company deals with the telcos, but Motorola's CANOPY division has been selling to WISPs for years.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 21, 2004]

On the ISP-Wireless in April, one list member posted a question:

I am planning a fairly large Motorola CANOPY installation. We have been testing several trial units and have been pleased. I would just like to know if anyone has any real horror stories about CANOPY.

Users reported that latency is 20 ms and that sometimes, long distance point to point (PtP) links can be unforgiving and have to be lined up exactly. Maybe Motorola's CANOPY team (called the Wireless Broadband Products Group) was lurking. When we reach Juan Santiago, the group's director of strategy, he tells us that the latency has been reduced from 20 ms to 5 ms.

That's how we became Motorola
Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola is a mammoth of a company doing everything wireless from chips to cell phones to cutting edge outdoor fixed wireless systems. The company's first product, in 1928, was a revolutionary "battery eliminator" which allowed radio owners to plug their radios directly into standard household current. In the 1930s, the company pioneered the product that gave it its present name, the car radio (though the name change didn't happen until 1947). Motorola's been in RF since 1928, and it's been a pioneer since that time too.

Today, the company's customers include the U.S. government and the RBOCs, and this makes some WISPs suspicious of the company, but others are eager to test the product. It piques curiosity because, just like that battery eliminator, there's nothing else quite like it on the market right now.

A quick scanning of the ISP-Wireless list suggests that WISPs looking at CANOPY gear are also looking at Vivato and Trango. They're looking for high-end, stable access points that can handle a large number of users at a reasonable price.

"We're in what's starting to become known as the WiMAX space," says Santiago, meaning that CANOPY products are more stable than mere Wi-Fi.

"Some vendors are trying to bring Wi-Fi outdoors," Santiago admits. "But they still face the problems of 802.11 physics and protocols. When you add more users, they can collide. If you have hundreds of subscribers, you need a more controlled way to have access. CANOPY is a departure from Wi-Fi. Each base station assigns times for each subscriber to talk—it's built in QoS—and the result is a range of up to 10 miles."

Santiago adds that CANOPY is more secure than Wi-Fi. "You cannot get into the system unless you're a paying subscriber. With WiMAX, all of this is built in, and it can be built into Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi is not inherently secure."

CANOPY is also touting its product as VoIP ready. "Voice traffic gets tagged to get priority. There are other things going on in the background, but that's the bottom line. When things have a time dimension, you need this. A delay in e-mail delivery is no problem, but a delay in VoIP deliver is a problem. You can hear latency. If you're playing a video game over the Internet, you can see latency. That's why we reduced the latency from 20 ms to 5 ms."

We hang in your neighborhood
Motrola's Wireless Broadband Products Group is reaching out to WISPs with a series of webinars and training sessions. The group has also developed marketing materials. "I cannot think of any company in the outdoor wireless broadband marketplace out there doing the things we're doing for our customers," says Santiago. "Some WISPs just need to place a door hanger in nearby neighborhood subdivisions. WISPs can go to a website and generate a .pdf file that can be printed out professionally at a Kinko's."

The company is working closely with distributors. "It's the only way to get to the small guy," says Santiago. "We have twelve major distributors worldwide, working with over 500 VARs."

Santiago also touts the company's CPE rebate program, which can be accessed through the Motorola CANOPY home page. The program is for ISPs purchasing $20,000 of equipment per quarter. "Our message to WISPs is this: we want you to grow," says Santiago.

Last but certainly not least, Santiago touts a few of the technological advantages of the CANOPY system:

1. The system has multiple radios, one of which can be used for backhaul with a range of up to 35 miles in a tight, focused point to point beam.
   
   
2. The system is designed so that multiple CANOPY radios can be located relatively close together where space is a premium.
   
   
3. "It's an unbelievably good radio. Typically, Wi-Fi systems have a Carrier to Interference (C to I) ratio of between 25 and 18 dB. Ours is three. That means that the signal only has to be twice as strong as the interference, which can translate into being deployable in a noisy, urban environment, or into better distance, as we can hear a dimmer signal at long distance."

Santiago would like to tell us more, but the group is hiring and he's got an applicant to interview. Sounds like business is good. "We're in over 85 countries worldwide," Santiago says.

Pricing and availability
The product is available now in 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and in the 5.2 and 5.7 GHz bands.

For resellers in your region, simply go to the purchase page. In North America, a 900 MHz starter kit, with an access point and 20 CPE radios, is priced at under $18,000 (note: some starter kits include a larger number of client radios and are priced accordingly). Trial kits, consisting of an access point and 2 CPE radios, are available for less than $3,000.

In North America, most subscriber radios cost above $500 per module before rebate and volume purchase deals.

.

—End