Wireless

Wireless In Montana

Why aren't more ISPs selling wireless Net connections — considering the lack of rural broadband alternatives? After all, it's neither difficult nor expensive.

by Gerry Blackwell
[December 29, 1999]

Here's a newsflash from remote northwestern Montana: You don't have to be a big, rich ISP to think about adding high-speed wireless access services to your portfolio of service offerings.

Just ask Frederick Weber, president of Montana Sky Network. The company is located in Rexford, near the Canadian border, just east of the Idaho panhandle. The nearest city with an airport is 200 miles away.

Montana Sky's Lincoln County market area, about the size of Rhode Island, only has 18,000 residents. The company is very small too: just 500 customers, mostly consumer dial-up accounts.

Exactly eight, so far, are connected to the company's high-speed wireless service, which delivers 1 Mbps. Montana Sky started offering the service in May.

Roll your own
The company built its own wireless network from scratch using equipment from market leader BreezeCOM. The equipment operates over the unlicensed 2.4 GHz radio spectrum.

Weber charges consumer customers just $45 a month. Of course, they do have to shell out $300 to $600 for radio equipment, which may be a big part of why more haven't signed up.

On the other hand, there aren't many alternatives if you want high-speed access —no cable, no DSL. "Just to rent the copper [from the phone company] for a T1 costs $300 a month," Weber says. "And that's just to go across the street."

In fact, in some parts of the region there are two LECs. If the route from POP to customer site passes from one LATA (local access and transport area) to another, you pay double—just for the wire, more to go any distance. Then ISP port charges on top of that.

Making converts
But not enough of his customers and prospective customers are sophisticated enough to understand the value Weber is offering. "You could tell them 28.8 Kb or 56 Kb or a five pound turkey and the answers would all be the same—'Well, that's not a real big one…'"

But they know, once they get it, that it's faster. "When the guy clicks on something, he gets a result, now. The picture pops onto the screen—instead of having time to go to the refrigerator, get a glass of milk, put a bagle in the microwave, come back and the page is loaded."

Weber is clearly not in it to make a killing, although he is working on the local school district to invest in radio equipment. The schoolboard is currently sharing an expensive copper T1. And Weber says if businesses want to use the service and put a server at their end, he'll charge more.

Montana Sky itself spent $5,000 on the BreezeCOM equipment. It set up a network that mostly serves local towns but also reaches one customer on a remote homestead near the border. "You figure if you've got ten customers at $45, you pay for this in a year," Weber points out.

He claims setting up the network was a breeze. But he also admits to having some radio background—"I understand it, it's not voodoo to me."

Back-door entry
And he was already in the wireless Internet business as a customer. Montana Sky buys its 2-Mb link to the Internet backbone from Intellicom, a satellite services company. (It costs $2,200, compared to $5,000-plus for a U S West T1.)

Still, he describes the BreezeCOM equipment as "plug and play," and compares the technical side of the setup to hooking up a stereo. This may be a slight exaggeration—Weber is prone to them. And in his case, there were some added non-technical wrinkles.

The network includes an antenna placed atop a lookout tower on a nearby mountain. Inside the tower, connected by coaxial cable, is a BreezeCOM transceiver unit. Getting permission to locate the antenna at the tower was the big obstacle.

"It took eight months for those idiots to get over wanting me to do wind-level studies," Weber says. "This is on an antenna the size of David Letterman's cigar! Finally some guy figures out, hey, it's only six inches tall and weighs eight ounces."

It took a second hop, another antenna and transceiver on another hilltop, to link back to Montana Sky's main POP. The radio technology requires line of sight between antennas. The resulting network can deliver 1 Mbps up to eight miles from any of the antennas.

Comfort factor
Weber can think of only one reason why more ISPs aren't following his lead. "Most ISPs I've run into," he says, "are lazy."

"They don't go out to customers' houses if they want help. They don't even want to talk to them on the phone. If someone says, 'My hard disk bombed, what're the [dial-up networking] settings?' they don't want to hear it. They think the 56K customer is a nuisance."

(We guess from this that northwestern Montana is actually on another planet. He goes to their houses!?)

Still, Weber has a point. If setting up a wireless network is even close to being as easy as he says it is, why aren't more ISPs doing this?

"By taking a small amount of risk and spending an extraordinarily small amount of money, I now have all the stuff in place to supply 500 customers," Weber says.

Let's see: 500 customers at $45 each…

—End