The cost and bureaucracy of laying high-speed cables in two different countries made fixed wireless the only feasible choice, says UTEP CIO Anna Hines. "There may be fiber in the ground, but not the type of bandwidth that is required [for Internet2]," she says. "This is a totally different type of backbone."

In corporate settings, point-to-point is more commonly used to extend a LAN from one building to another. Banner Healthcare, Caterpillar and Merrill Lynch among countless others all use point-to-point fixed wireless in this capacity to one degree or another. Fargo, N.D.-based Banner Healthcare, for example, moved 110 Greeley, Colo.-based employees to an offsite building two miles away. To connect them to the main system they could have spent about $34,000 annually on a 45Mbps DS-3 line (assuming Qwest approved the construction). That didn’t measure up well against a $37,000 onetime charge for a 100Mbps fixed wireless connection. The DS-3 line would also have taken as long as 18 months to install, whereas the wireless system was up and running within 30 days. "Going to fixed wireless removes us from the mercy of third-party carriers and gives us control," says Banner CIO Paul Panico.

Point-to-Multipoint

The fixed wireless cases above illustrate what Gartner Analyst Phil Redman sees as the overall adoption pattern: Companies use fixed wireless because fiber lines are not a viable option, mostly due to location. That pattern is even more obvious in point-to-multipoint wireless. The economic slump that has ravaged the telecom sector has hit point-to-multipoint service providers particularly hard. And the technology’s largest backers?AT&T Wireless and Sprint Worldcom?recently abandoned their multipoint initiatives, signaling an overall industry collapse.

There are two types of point-to-multipoint technologies: LMDS (local multipoint distribution system), a super high-speed (up to 1.5Gbps), short-range signal (2 miles) in the 27GHz to 30GHz spectrum; and MMDS (multipoint microwave distribution system), a slower speed (30Mbps), long-range (20 miles) signal in the 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz range. Experiments have also been done with 802.11 technology.

A point-to-multipoint receptor on a buildings sends a signal to a tower, which transmits the signal to the Internet access point. But the equipment and service is expensive and hasn’t caught on?IDC estimates that there were 100,000 new point-to-multipoint customers in 2001 compared with 1.7 million customers for DSL, multipoint’s land-based competitor. "The economics of it says it only makes sense to put a tower in fully saturated areas," says Brad Baldwin, broadband research director at IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher, CXO Media). "In the [San Francisco] Bay area, for example, there is a tower up serving a very dense area. But it is too expensive [compared with DSL] to get enough customers in these areas."