BellSouth launches wireless broadband

SAN FRANCISCO - BellSouth Corp. on Monday launched a commercial wireless broadband service designed to travel with subscribers as they move from place to place. The service debuted in the university community of Athens, Georgia.

The carrier is pushing the service as an alternative to its DSL (digital subscriber line) offering, primarily for students who frequently move and in many cases aren't signing up for the regular fixed phone lines over which DSL is carried, according to BellSouth spokeswoman Nadine Randall. Students will be able to suspend the service during the school-break months of May, June and July, paying only a nominal fee per month. The network covers an area around the University of Georgia campus and has a range of three to five miles, she said.

The small wireless broadband deployment is among the first by a major U.S. carrier, though other fixed-line and cellular providers including Nextel Communications Inc., Sprint Corp. and Qwest Communications International Inc. have explored the technology. BellSouth also plans to use it to reach rural customers who can't access DSL, Randall said. It plans to start commercial services in some rural Florida communities later this year, she said.

Access to the service is via a modem that fits in the palm of one's hand and connects to a PC, router or Wi-Fi access point via Ethernet, said Sai Subramanian, vice president for marketing and product management at Navini Networks Inc., which supplied the network and customer equipment. Users can take the modem with them when they leave home and use the service at other locations in the coverage area, or even while moving at walking speed, Subramanian said.

Navini designed the proprietary Ripwave equipment around the emerging IEEE 802.16e standard, which is expected to form the basis of a second generation of WiMax wireless broadband technology in 2007. The Richardson, Texas, company bypassed the current version of WiMax, expected to hit the market in certified products by year's end, because it doesn't allow for mobility, Subramanian said. There are already commercial deployments of Ripwave gear in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as in Australia, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and other countries, according to Navini. The company plans to introduce modems in the fourth quarter of this year that will be upgradable via software to work with eventual certified mobile WiMax networks, Subramanian said.

The service comes in two versions: one offers a top speed of 384K bps (bits per second) downstream and 128K bps upstream for US$29.95 per month, while the other provides as much as 1.5M bps downstream and 256K bps upstream for $39.95 per month. Both come with five e-mail accounts, 10M bytes of Web hosting space and 20 hours per month of dial-up Internet access as a backup, Randall said. BellSouth charges $99.99 for the modem.

BellSouth has two or three base stations delivering the service over radio spectrum it has licensed, Randall said. With the current deployment, it has enough capacity for 600 subscribers. Consumer demand will determine future expansion in Athens and elsewhere, she said.