TowerStream pioneered T-1 replacement with wireless broadband for businesses: That's not to say they were first, but they established the market, and have slowly grown to more and more major cities. MetroFi formally entering the business in Portland, Ore., for up to 10 Mbps wireless broadband thus isn't a giant event in the history of business-grade circuits. Rather, it's a significant move in metro-scale networks.
Service will start at $350 per month for T-1 speeds and rise to $1,500 per month for a 10 Mbps circuit and $1,000 for the receiver, the company told me. By comparison, Speakeasy Networks charges $390 per month for a wireline T-1. Towerstream charges $500 for a T-1 speed connection with bursts up to 3 Mbps, and $2,200 per month for 8 Mbps and $2,970 per month for 12 Mbps; their prices vary based on service level agreements.
As I and others have been writing over the last few months, there's been a kazoo-bassoon duet playing behind news coming from municipal markets. Subscribers numbers are poor. It's hard to get an indoor signal without a Wi-Fi bridge that costs $100 to $150 typically, but could run $300 for a higher-powered unit. And so on.
Thus the public announcement that MetroFi is actively seeking business customers looking to switch from wireline or gain far higher access speeds is good news--it's another line of revenue for the company. It's something that EarthLink et al. promised in the very beginning, too. Business-grade service using pre-WiMax, WiMax, or proprietary point-to-multipoint technology would be one of the revenue legs in the municipal network stool. All the metro-scale network buildings have to put some kind of aggregating point-to-multipoint hubs to carry their backhaul; the topology varies, but it's all there.
In MetroFi's case, their technology partner SkyPilot originally designed their networking architecture to handle lots of high-speed connections from pointed antennas (not omnidirectional ones). SkyPilot uses some clever techniques to create the equivalent of a dedicated wireless connection for very brief periods of time. (They have one radio and switch in a time-synchronized fashion among eight antennas, only broadcasting to a 45-degree arc and a single paired device at a time.)
MetroFi's release said that they could have service to a location in the covered area typically within a week. Upping the speed is a matter of a configuration change by MetroFi. MetroFi is also offering a service-level agreement; these contracts bind the provider to specific speeds and uptime, with discounts when those goals aren't met.
T-1 lines are the gold standard for reliability, although I have heard horror stories from plenty of telco customers that have seen nothing like 99.999 percent availability, and only excuses from the incumbent providers. Wireless broadband's advantage to a customer is that bandwidth can scale above 1.5 Mbps with no additional equipment or installation. The leap from T-1 to fractional T-3 (about 45 Mbps, sold in increments up to that level) is rather large. Broadband wireless can also be installed in as little as minutes, in a pinch, and the provider has no wirebase to depreciate, just equipment on either end; they typically get the customer to pay for their receiver, or get a one-year or more commitment to eat the cost of the receiver.