I’ve written a few times over the years about Starry, a wireless ISP that is originally launching in Boston. The company was founded by Chet Kanojia who readers might remember as the founder of Aereo – the company that tried to deliver affordable local programming through a wireless connection.

Starry’s product set is simple – $50 per month for 200 Mbps broadband. There’s a $50 install fee and then $50 per month with no add-ons or extra charges. This easily beats the regular broadband prices for Charter and Verizon FiOS, both at $70+ for the same speed when considering the charge for the modem.

Starry has changed its business plan. They had first announced a launch in 2016 that was going to beam to a small antenna placed in a customer’s window. I’m imagining they ran into a number of issues with this, including technical issues, because that plan never went beyond the first round of beta testing and Starry went quiet.

The new technology will use millimeter wave spectrum to beam broadband to a receiver on the top of apartment buildings and will then use existing wiring to connect to customers. This involves point-to-point radios. Starry launched a few years ago using licensed millimeter wave spectrum at 38.2 and 38.6 GHz. The company says they are going to be using spectrum between 37 GHz and 40 GHz, so they must be planning to engage in the upcoming auctions for 37 GHz and 39 GHz spectrum.

At the spectrum they are using they could easily be beaming between 1 – 2 gigabytes of data to a given apartment building today. That will increase if they get access to more bands of spectrum.  That’s plenty of bandwidth to provide a 200 Mbps product to every tenant. The company is advertising that they are using pre-5G technology. That’s an interesting phrase because they are likely delivering Ethernet over the wireless connection to each building. Perhaps if they buy more spectrum they will then claim to be using 5G. This is an interesting concept for point-to-point radios because the 5G standard doesn’t do anything to increase the speed on a connection. However, they might get some advantages from 5G which will make it easier to link multiple frequencies on the same point-to-point path.

The current business plan is to use the existing wiring in a building. That is interesting because they are bringing broadband to the roof, and the wiring from apartment buildings today always originates on the first floor or basement in a communications space. I have to think that Starry is dropping a fiber from the roof to the communications room in order to get access to wiring.

The only wiring that is almost always available in a home-run configuration to each apartment is the telco copper, and I guess this is the wiring they are using. With today’s G.Fast technology it’s easy in most cases to achieve speeds of at least 400 Mbps and sometimes faster. I’ve heard that G.Fast is achieving near gigabit speeds in labs, so it’s likely over time that Starry will be able to step up the speeds. Coaxial cables are a different matter and there are numerous different wiring schemes around and also a wide variety of situations where the cable incumbent can lay claim to those cables.

Starry is creating yet another competitor for anybody building broadband in an urban environment. I have a hard time seeing this technology making any sense in a small town or rural environment. In cities the technology probably only makes sense for somewhat sizable apartment buildings, or perhaps multi-tenant business buildings. It’s an intriguing technology for landlords because they can offer tenants another option other than the incumbent cable or telephone company.

It’s been interesting over the years to watch the evolution of broadband in apartment buildings. For many years there were hurdles for a competitor to deliver big bandwidth inside apartment buildings. The cost of rewiring older apartment buildings was often prohibitive. But today there are lower-cost techniques for stringing fiber inside older buildings as well as creative uses of existing wiring such as using G.Fast. Where apartment buildings were often left out of fiber business plans they are now a big focus for competitors.

The bottom line is that anybody planning on competing for downtown apartment buildings will have another potential competitor. Starry plans on being in most major metropolitan markets and there are likely going to be copycat ISPs that do this elsewhere. Urban apartment buildings have gone from being underserved to perhaps having some of the best broadband in any market.