At first glance the project appeared impossible. Here we were, in the middle of the desert, 500 miles from the nearest real city – and we needed to install a campus telecom network covering an area of about 150 square kilometers. Objective was to make campus communications function at the same level as a city-based industrial campus. Memories of military leadership exercises came to mind, where with a limited number of tools you faced an expectation that with a bit of tenacity and creativity under the right conditions your team could make sea shells do HF radio.
We go back to basic telecom engineering. Your task is to take a budget, existing or emerging technology, a relatively clear set of objectives – and then design a flexible solution that completely meets and exceeds everybody's expectations. Of course this must be ahead of schedule and under budget. Simple, right?
So in the middle of the desert we incorporate new technologies, such as wireless bridging to connect major campus locations, VoIP to take advantage of lower startup and operating costs for both internal and external communications, a VSAT link to the home office, and then gateways for network connectivity and voice transit/termination. Using a numbering plan provided by the upstream VoIP provider, and voila! You are now an extension of the office PBX located 3000 miles away in the comfort of your company home office.
Only fixed lines in the scenario are LAN connections within campus buildings, and that is only really useful for connecting file servers to the LAN/WLAN, or VoIP phones to the LAN. This is for those old folks who still mentally find themselves attached to a desktop handset – not those of us using a wireless PDA with a softphone, or WiFi handset.
Surprise – in 2002 we built a model very similar to this for a mining company in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Details on demand.
Shift to Seoul South Korea. Walking along the street you see a lot of phone booths. Funny thing is there are no wires connecting to the phone booths, and you see a little antenna sticking up from the top of the booth. Explanation is wireless DSL. Cool.
Shift to New Orleans, Morris Point (Minnesota), or Long Beach. New developments going in, old developments being demolished as part of post storm reconstruction. All needing high performance communications infrastructure – whether for basic entertainment or for network communications. Let's look at the existing telecom tool bag for assets. Verizon Broadband Wireless, SBC broadband, DirecTV – or an enterprising start up company using a Gobi Desert style wireless campus hub. All could deliver a service equal to or better than services formerly riding on top of the copper infrastructure – or for areas which are simply "Greenfield" sites with no existing cable plant or telephone infrastructure. Surprise, all are available in our reconstruction zone.
You might say "well, you know wireless and cable have little capacity – it is not suitable for the high traffic links needed to run a business or entertainment. Hmm… Looking at marketing materials for companies such as Gigabeam (www.gigabeam.com) it appears we can now sling up to about 10Gbps through the air – that is a pretty healthy bridge. You can sling 10Gbps up to a mile, 1Gbps a couple miles, and other capacities down to 512 Mbps up to about 30 miles line of sight. Probably enough to meet the needs of Morris Point, Minnesota. Probably enough to meet the neighborhood needs of Long Beach, California as well.
OK, the capacity argument is history. Wireless can actually provide much higher "line" capacity than existing copper cable plant, and it is a heck of a lot less expensive. Next argument…
Hmm… starting to run short on arguments for replacing existing models of "land line" communications with wireless? Don't feel lonely. About the only model of outside cable plant being installed is fiber intended for use by telephone companies to increase line capacity to homes in an effort to compete with cable television companies. Verizon's FIOS will carry not only >50Mbps Internet access to the home, it will also handle entertainment channels quite nicely. Far cry from plain old telephone service (POTS). So Verizon's intent is not to deliver high performance POTS, it is to deliver telephone, CATV, and high speed Internet. Also cool.
As a competitive entertainment and telecommunications project, we look forward to more creative and useful ideas coming from all telecom companies. I personally do not care if my entertainment comes from Comcast, DirecTV, SBC, Verizon, or Time Warner – I simply want the most advanced entertainment and communications available. I do not care if it is over fiber, copper, or through the air. I just want 450 TV channels, Internet that provides whatever content I want with no delay, and an effective way to communicate with any telephone or presence device to any point in the world.
However I live in a very technically advanced part of the United States, have not suffered a catastrophic natural disaster, and am not at the mercy of a single telecom provider.
Back to the gulf coast and Morris Point. You need to deliver high performance communications to every addressable home and business in the area. You need to do it fast. You need to do it under a reasonable budget. Do you buy telephone switches, copper, and dig up the streets for either conduits and manholes, or plant telephone poles every 100ft? Or do you take advantage of high performance wireless technologies that are only restricted by the end user having electricity and the potential for a line of sight to a wireless transmitter?
Let's not waste time on E911 issues – those are solved. Near 0% of homes in the US are without at least one mobile phone, with GPS, that is available at a moments notice if there is an emergency. Regardless if the mobile phone is using packet or CDMA, the GPS device still pinpoints you within about 1 meter. Also, and in particular with wireless, batteries are an inherent part of the end user device – or a UPS can easily be installed if E911 services are really essential to those in the country side. A backhoe, car accident (whacking a pole), or any one of a thousand other variables can work to bring down a POTS line as easily as a wireless connection.
Let's not waste time on "business toll quality" issues. Those are solved. Sometime check your long distance or international call setup time on Skype versus a toll call. Let's not waste time on any issues other than delivering telecom and entertainment services to end users – wherever they may be.
Recovery time from a natural or man made disaster is now based on restoring an antenna, splicing a cable feeding an antenna, and aligning the antennas. Your WiFi Internet connection feeding a laptop or WiFi phone does not need cable or line-of-sight alignment, so once the antenna is restored you are online. This is calculated in days, rather than months. Remember the stories following Katrina of young people driving vans down to the gulf, setting up a portable generator, linking a wireless bridge to a "friendly" ISP, and then providing email and VoIP access to neighborhoods cut off from the world? If a 19 year old high school grad with a portable generator can get global communications installed within hours after a natural disaster, then shouldn't we at least consider this model for disaster response, if not a permanent solution?
The big guys do not like this discussion. It is hard to give up a monopoly. It is hard to accept the possibility that in 5 years a telephone number will only be a reference of convenience as the world turns to presence indicators. It is hard to accept the automobile took the place of horses and carriage, or the airplane took the place of trains and cruise ships for long distance travel. But it happened, and we are all better for the change.
As a society we need to prepare ourselves for the upcoming quantum shift in technology-enabled communications and entertainment. As a business we need to keep a close eye on the first movers and be prepared to move ahead, either through R&D or M&A.
For Morris Point and the Gulf Coast? Sure, feel free to string fiber on the long distance side of the network (assuming your fiber is not already in place – that might be an astonishing revelation). Let's forget this final mile copper infrastructure nonsense. Let's aggressively exploit existing and emerging wireless technologies and meet the needs of community and business. Really.
John Savageau is a managing director at CRG-West, responsible for managing operations and architecture for several of the largest telecommunications interconnect facilities in the US, including One Wilshire in Los Angeles. |
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