Tag: Starry

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The Industry

Defaulting on RDOF

Starry recently announced that it was defaulting on all of its $269 million of RDOF funding. Starry was the ninth-largest winner of the RDOF reverse auction that ended in December 2020. The FCC approved some of the Starry RDOF claims in August.

There have been other defaults of RDOF, but no others of this magnitude. For example, in the same announcement of the Starry default were additional defaults by Cal.net and GeoLinks. There were a lot of defaults in the spring of 2021 when winners defaulted on small pockets of Census blocks that weren’t large enough for a coherent business plan.

Starry is not required to disclose why it’s defaulting. In the many articles about the RDOF default, there was a lot of speculation that the company doesn’t have the needed funding to complete the required builds. Starry reported 77,400 customers at the end of the second quarter of this year – gaining 14,300 customers in the quarter. The company claimed that it now passes 5.7 million potential customers. But the company has a big burn rate with a loss for the quarter of $33.9 million plus capital expenditures of $20.8 million.

Even if funding is the issue, funding wouldn’t yet be an emergency for Starry. An RDOF winner has three years starting with the year after the awards – in this case until 2025, to cover 40% of the RDOF areas. But delaying the cancellation probably risks increasing fines from the FCC.

I’ve also heard speculation from engineers that Starry might not have been happy with the performance of its technology in rural areas. It seems like a technology best suited to areas with decent household density. The technology being deployed can best be described as a wireless mesh network. Starry brings broadband into a neighborhood and then bounces signal from customer to customer to extend the reach of the network. Over time as the company gets more customers, it can blanket a large coverage area. This is a drastically different approach than the FWA cellular wireless deployments that reply on putting a small cell site in every served neighborhood – most of them fed by fiber. The Starry deployment should need fewer fiber-fed hubs and theoretically would have a lower cost deployment.

In June 2021, Starry announced a deployment across the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area. But there is a big difference between the densely populated suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and rural areas in RDOF where homes might not be within sight of neighbors. There are plenty of engineers that are still skeptical of wireless plans using tall towers to bring fast speeds to rural areas. It’s even hard to imagine doing it with a mesh network.

With the default, all of the RDOF areas are back in play for other federal grants. Unfortunately for the customers in these areas that thought they had a broadband solution coming, they now need another ISP to step up and claim grant funding of some sort to bring broadband.

As can be seen on the map below of the Starry award areas, the company had claimed sizable service areas in Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Starry’s default is different than the recent action by the FCC to toss the RDOF awards to LTD Broadband and Starlink. The FCC had already made some awards to Starry, and the assumption is that it would have made the rest. The bottom line is that the Starry default is one more piece of the puzzle of solving the rural broadband gap, and the ISPs located close to the Starry defaults should take a hard look at changing grant plans.

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Regulation - What is it Good For? Technology

The 12 GHz Battle

A big piece of what the FCC does is to weigh competing claims to use spectrum. It seems like there have been non-stop industry fights over the last decade on who gets to use various bands of spectrum. One of the latest fights, which is the continuation of a fight going on since 2018, is for the use of the 12 GHz spectrum.

The big wrestling match is between Starlink’s desire to use the spectrum to communicate with its low-orbit satellites and cellular carriers and WISPs who want to use the spectrum for rural broadband. Starlink uses this spectrum to connect its ground-based terminals to satellites. Wireless carriers argue that the spectrum should also be shared to enhance rural broadband networks.

The 12 GHz band is attractive to Starlink because it contains 500 MHz of contiguous spectrum with 100 MHz channels – a big data pipe for reaching between satellites and earth. The spectrum is attractive to wireless ISPs for these same reasons, along with other characteristics. The 12 GHz spectrum will carry twice as far as the other spectrum in point-to-multipoint broadband networks, meaning it can cover four times the area from a given tower. The spectrum is also clear of any federal or military encumbrance – something that restricts other spectrum like CBRS. The spectrum also is being used for cellular purposes internationally, which makes for an easy path to find the radios and receivers to use it.

In the current fight, Starlink wants exclusive use of the spectrum, while wireless carriers say that both sides can share the spectrum without much interference. These are always the hardest fights for the FCC to figure out because most of the facts presented by both sides are largely theoretical. The only true way to find out about interference is in real-world situations – something that is hard to simulate any other way,

A few wireless ISPs are already using the 12 GHz spectrum. One is Starry, which has recently joined the 12 GHz Coalition, the group lobbying for terrestrial use of the spectrum. This coalition also includes other members like Dish Networks, various WISPs, and the consumer group Public Knowledge. Starry is one of the few wireless ISPs currently using millimeter-wave spectrum for broadband. The company added almost 10,000 customers to its wireless networks in the second quarter and is poised to grow a lot faster. If the FCC opens the 12 GHz spectrum to all terrestrial uses, it seems likely that use of the spectrum would quickly be used in many rural areas.

As seems usual these days, both sides in the spectrum fight say that the other side is wrong about everything they are saying to the FCC. This must drive the engineers at the FCC crazy since they have to wade through the claims made by both sides to get to the truth. The 12 GHz Coalition has engineering studies that show that the spectrum could coexist with satellite usage with a 99.85% assurance of no interference. Starlink, of course, says that engineering study is flawed and that there will be significant interference. Starlink wants no terrestrial use of the spectrum.

On the flip side, the terrestrial ISPs say that the spectrum in dispute is only 3% of the spectrum portfolio available to Starlink, and the company has plenty of bandwidth and is being greedy.

I expect that the real story is somewhere in between the stories told by both sides. It’s these arguments that make me appreciate the FCC technical staff. It seems every spectrum fight has two totally different stories defending why each side should be the one to win use of spectrum.

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The Industry

Starry Back in the News

I’ve written about Starry several times since they first tried to launch in 2016. Their first market launch was a failure and it seems that the technology of beaming broadband to windows in apartment units never worked as planned. Since then the company has regrouped and now is using a business plan of connecting to the roofs of apartment buildings using millimeter wave radio. This is the same business plan pursued by Webpass, which was purchased by Google, although the technology and spectrum are different.

Starry was founded by Chet Kanojia who was also the founder of Aereo – the company that tried to deliver affordable local programming in cities through a wireless connection. Starry originally launched in Boston but has recently added Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

Starry is still advertising a simple product set – $50 per month for 200 Mbps symmetrical broadband. There’s a $50 install fee and then no add-ons or extra charges on top of the $50 rate. This easily beats the prices of the big cable companies or of Verizon FiOS. Starry is likely filling a competitive void in New York City where Verizon has still failed to connect broadband to thousands of high rises and millions of potential subscribers.

Starry is advertising ease of use along with low prices. Once a building is added to the Starry network they promise to install a customer at a scheduled time rather than providing a 4-6 hour window like their landline competition. Their web site doesn’t discuss the technology used to reach buildings, but it says they use existing building wiring. G.Fast is likely being used to deliver the technology over telephone wiring inside the building since there is no easy way to share coaxial cable if a customer is still buying cable TV. That would also explain how they can promise fast hook-ups since every unit in a high rise would typically already have telephone wiring.

Starry may be planning for faster speeds in the future since they were one of the largest buyers of spectrum in the 2019 auction for 24 GHz spectrum. Starry still advertises that they use phased-array antennas. This technology allows a single antenna radiator to transmit at different phases of the same frequency. This is one of the easiest ways to ‘steer’ the direction of the signal and Starry uses this technology to accomplish beamforming. What that means in a busy urban environment is that Starry can deliver more bandwidth to a rooftop than a traditional transmitter antenna.

Interestingly, the company doesn’t claim to be delivering 5G, as is every other wireless provider. This should provide a good example, that millimeter wave spectrum does not automatically equate to 5G. Starry says they are still using the simpler and cheaper 802.11 WiFi standards within the broadband path.

MoffettNathanson recently said they were bullish on the Starry model. Even though the company currently has a relatively small number if customers, their goal of chasing 30% of the urban high-rise market seems credible to the analysts. Starry’s technology can deliver broadband all across an urban downtown from one or two big tower transmitters. That contrasts with Verizon’s 5G technology that delivers fast bandwidth from small cells that must be within 1,000 feet of a home. MoffettNathanson did caution that Starry’s business plan is likely not replicable in the suburbs or smaller towns – but there are a lot of potential customers sitting in high rises in the urban centers of the country.

This kind of competition adds a lot of pressure on other ISPs wanting to serve large apartment buildings in downtown areas. Verizon found the gaining entry to buildings was their key stumbling block in gaining access to buildings in Manhattan, which resulted in the company badly violating their agreement with the City to bring FiOS to everybody. A wireless company like Starry can leap over the long list of impediments that make it hard to bring wires into urban high rises – and low prices for good broadband ought to be an interesting competitive alternative for a lot of people.

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The Industry

Starry Resurfaces

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.

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The Industry

Starry Back in the News

You might remember Starry as the ISP that announced it was going to offer wireless broadband in Boston at the beginning of 2016. At the time the company began advertising and selling window receivers. But then the company went silent and just recently reemerged with an announcement that it’s ready to finally go into business.

Starry is founded by Chet Kanojia, the founder of Aereo. That company tried to wirelessly transmit local TV signals to subscribers but got shut down through a series of court challenges. But Kanojia is back now and ready to tackle the major ISPs with a competitive broadband product.

The company claims that it is going to be able to beam a 200 Mbps broadband connection for up to two miles from a transmitter (although the signal at the end of that distance probably won’t be that strong). Starry has opted to use the 802.11ac standard and is transmitting using the licensed 37 – 38.6 GHz frequency. The company has plans to upgrade soon to the new 802.11ax standard.

This frequency is licensed from the FCC in two ways. First, there is going to be one nationwide license for the 37 – 37.6 GHz bands that will be coordinated to share under the nationwide frequency holder, and that is likely to be used for mobile broadband. The rest of the frequency will be licensed to up to five license holders for each PEA (Partial Economic Area). These are geographic footprints of relatively the same size and there are 416 covering the whole country.

This same frequency is now also available for mobile broadband and it’s expected that 5G providers will grab a lot of the licenses in metropolitan areas where there is enough density to justify a 5G mobile data application.

The Starry deployment will need to deploy multiple transmitters in a given geographic area if they want to reach most of the customers. For instance, a transmitter than can only see the east side of a building won’t be able to serve somebody on the west side. And metropolitan areas also have a lot of wireless shadows where a taller building will hide transmissions to shorter buildings behind it.

The company still plans to deploy this network using receivers placed in a window. That will allow them to avoid issues involved with getting landlord permission or of serving a building with one transmitter and then somehow wiring to get to customers (the Webpass business model).

The company’s website is promoting a 200 Mbps connection for $50 per month, with no monthly usage cap and with no gimmicks or additional fees. This will include the customer receivers. The company says its receiver costs $150 and the customer CPE costs $200 – $220, with needed equipment included in the customer monthly price.

Starry is already operating in its test-bed market of Boston and announced new beta test deployments in Los Angeles and Washington DC. It says it plans to expand offerings by the end of the year to Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. I’ve seen a few analysts wondering where the company will get the money needed for a widespread deployment.

The technology is best suited to densely populated areas in order to maximize the number of potential customers that can be reached by the relatively short 2-mile radius from a given transmitter.

This technology won’t be easy for others to copy. At least for a while its unlikely that smaller ISPs are going to easily be able to obtain the licensed spectrum that Starry is using. Starry has also developed its own proprietary electronics, much like Kanojia did for Aereo. Maybe more importantly, the other big wireless companies are pursuing the 5G standard rather than the WiFi standard, meaning that Starry might be one of the few companies pursuing this using WiFi. Without frequency and equipment it’s going to be hard for others to copy this.

A competitive wireless product at $50 per month is going to bring real competition to urban ISPs. We’ve just recently seen Comcast raise the rates for standalone broadband to $75 and we’ll have to see how companies like Starry and new 5G competitors affect the big ISPs and their pricing. The one big drawback for Starry and other 5G providers might be the lack of a cable offering and the rest of the traditional bundle. While it’s easy to think that cable is a dying product, 75% of the homes in the country still have a traditional cable subscription. These wireless products are aimed at cord cutters and we’ll just have to see how much of the market is ready to make that leap to standalone broadband at a lower price. I know I’d try it!

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Technology The Industry

5G Needs Fiber

I am finally starting to see an acknowledgement by the cellular industry that 5G implementation is going to require fiber – a lot of fiber. For the last year or so the industry press – prompted by misleading press releases from the wireless companies – made it sound like wireless was our future and that there would soon not be any need for building more wires.

As always, when there is talk about 5G there is a need to make sure which 5G we are talking about, because there are two distinct 5G technologies on the horizon. One is high-speed wireless loops send directly to homes and businesses as a replacement for a wired broadband connection. The other is 5G cellular providing bandwidth to our cellphones.

It’s interesting to see the term 5G being used for a wireless microwave connection to a home or business. For the past twenty years this same technology has been referred to as wireless local loop, but in the broadband world the term 5G has marketing cachet. Interestingly, a lot of these high-speed data connections won’t even be using the 5G standards and could just as easily be transmitting the signals using Ethernet or some other transmission protocol. But the marketing folks have declared that everything that uses the millimeter wave spectrum will be deemed 5G, and so it shall be.

These fixed broadband connections are going to require a lot of fiber close-by to customers. The current millimeter radios are capable of deliver speeds up to a gigabit on a point-to-point microwave basis. And this means that every 5G millimeter wave transmitter needs to be fiber fed if there is any desire to offer gigabit-like speeds at the customer end. You can’t use a 1-gigabit wireless backhaul to feed multiple gigabit transmitters, and thus fiber is the only way to get the desired speeds to the end locations.

The amount of fiber needed for this application is going to depend upon the specific way the network is being deployed. Right now the predominant early use for this technology is to use the millimeter wave radios to serve an entire apartment building. That means putting one receiver on the apartment roof and somehow distributing the signal through the building. This kind of configuration requires fiber only to those tall towers or rooftops used to beam a signal to nearby apartment buildings. Most urban areas already have the fiber to tall structures to support this kind of network.

But for the millimeter technology to bring gigabit speeds everywhere it is going to mean bringing fiber much closer to the customer. For example, the original Starry business plan in Boston had customers receiving the wireless signal through a window, and that means having numerous transmitters around a neighborhood so that a given apartment or business can see one of them. This kind of network configuration will require more fiber than the rooftop-only network.

But Google, AT&T and Verizon are all talking about using millimeter wave radios to bring broadband directly into homes. That kind of network is going to require even more fiber since a transmitter is going to need a clear shot near to street-level to see a given home. I look around my own downtown neighborhood and can see that one or two transmitters would only reach a fraction of homes and that it would take a pole-mounted transmitter in front of homes to do what these companies are promising. And those transmitters on poles are going to need to be fiber-fed if they want to deliver gigabit broadband.

Verizon seems to understand this and they have recently talked about needing a ‘fiber-rich’ environment to deploy 5G. The company has committed to building a lot of fiber to support this coming business plan.

But, as always, there is a flip side to this. These companies are only going to deploy these fast wireless loops in neighborhoods that already have fiber or in places where it makes economic sense to build it. And this is going to mean cherry-picking – the same as the big ISPs do today. They are not going to build the fiber in neighborhoods where they don’t foresee enough demand for the wireless broadband. They won’t build in neighborhoods where the fiber construction costs are too high. One only has to look at the hodgepodge Verizon FiOS fiber network to see what this is going to look like. There will be homes and businesses offered the new fast wireless loops while a block or two away there will be no use of the technology. Verizon has already created fiber haves and have-nots due to the way they built FiOS and 5G wireless loops are going to follow the same pattern.

I think the big ISPs have convinced politicians that they will be solving all future broadband problems with 5G, just as they made similar promises in the past with other broadband technologies. But let’s face it – money talks and these ISPs are only going to deploy 5G / fiber networks where they can make their desired returns.

And that means no 5G in poorer neighborhoods. It might mean little or limited 5G in neighborhoods with terrain or other similar issues. And it certainly means no 5G in rural America because the cost to build a 5G network is basically the same as building a landline fiber network – it’s not going to happen, at least not by the big ISPs.

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Current News Technology

The Challenges of Fixed Gigabit Wireless

We got a preview this week of what fixed wireless service might look like in urban environments. Google announced it is aggressively expanding the footprint of Webpass, the wireless ISP that Google purchased last year. The company has been operating in six cities and will now be expanding to nine more markets. These will all be downtown urban deployments.

The deployment uses high-capacity microwave links to serve high-rise buildings. Webpass already has 20,000 residential customers in the six markets, all which live in downtown high-rises. The company focuses more on serving business customers. This business plan has been around for years and I was actually helping to launch a business years ago with the same plan that died with the 2000 telecom crash.

The network consists of microwave shots to each building on the network. The first hurdle in getting this to work is to get enough quality radio sites to see buildings. As I noted in a blog last week, access to this kind of real estate is at a premium in urban areas, as cellphone providers have found when trying to deploy small cell sites.

The radios required to make the links are not gigantic, but you need one full radio and a dish at both ends of every link. This means that from any one given hub building there will be a limited number of links that can be made to other buildings, just due to space limitations. If you imagine half a dozen companies trying to this same thing (this will be the same basic deployment method for urban 5G), then you can picture a proliferation of companies fighting over available radio space on roofs.

Webpass in the past has limited their deployment to buildings that are either already wired with category 5 cable or fiber. They face the same issue that any broadband provider faces in bringing broadband into older buildings – only they are starting on the roof rather than from a basement wiring closet like other ISPs. There are very few ISPs yet willing to tackle the rewiring effort needed in large older buildings that serve residences. As you will see from the pricing below, Webpass and other ISPs are a lot more willing to tackle business buildings and absorb some rewiring costs.

The primary thing for the public to understand about this new roll-out is that it’s very limited. This won’t go to single family homes. It will go to downtown residential high-rises, but only to those that are pre-wired or easy to wire. And even in those buildings Webpass won’t go unless they get at least 10 customers. However, they will contract with landlords to serve whole buildings.

The Webpass pricing is interesting. For residential customers the price is $60 per month regardless of the speed achieved. Webpass says they deliver speeds between 100 Mbps and 500 Mbps, but in reading numerous reviews, there are complaints that speeds can get slower at peak evening time in some buildings (as one would expect when there are a lot of customers sharing one radio link).

Webpass’ pricing for businesses varies according to the number of other customers they get in a building. For example, if there are 10 or more business customers in a building they will sell a 100 – 200 Mbps connection for $250 per month with a 10 TB monthly data cap. But prices are much higher for customers in buildings with fewer than 10 customers:

Speed              Cost                 Data Cap         Price with no Cap

10 Mbps          $125                   1 TB                $375

20 Mbps          $250                   2 TB                $750

50 Mbps          $500                   5 TB                $1,500

100 Mbps        $1,000                10 TB              $2,000

250 Mbps                                                           $2,500

500 Mbps                                                           $4,000

1 Gbps                                                                $5,500

From a technical perspective Webpass is deploying in line with the way the technology works. The radios are too expensive to deploy to smaller customers or to smaller buildings. A building also need to be within a mile of the base transmitter (and hopefully closer) to get good speeds. That is largely going to mean downtown deployments.

We know there are a number of other companies considering a similar plan. Starry announced almost two years ago that they were deploying something similar in Boston, but has yet to launch. We know AT&T and Verizon are both exploring something similar to this Google product using 5G radios. But all of these companies are going to be fighting over the same limited markets.

The cellular companies keep hinting in their press releases that they will be able to use 5G to bring gigabit speeds. When they say that, this is the kind of deployment they are talking about. The only way they are going to be able to bring gigabit wireless speeds to single family homes and to suburbs is if they can develop some sort of mini transmitters to go onto utility poles. That technology is going to require building fiber close to each house and the radios are going to replace fiber drops. The above deployment by Webpass is not hype – they already have customers in six markets. But this technology is not the panacea for fast broadband for everyone that you might believe from reading the press releases.

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Current News Technology

Google Looking at Wireless Drops

In an interview with Re/code Craig Barrett, the CEO of Access for Alphabet said that Google is looking at wireless last mile technologies. Google is not the only one looking at this. The founder of Aereo has announced a new wireless initiative to launch this summer in Boston under the brand name of Starry. And Facebook says it is also investigating the technology.

The concept is not new. I remember visiting an engineer in Leesburg, Virginia back in the 90s who had developed a wireless local loop technology. He had working prototypes that could beam a big data pipe for the time (I’m fuzzily remembering a hundred Mbps back when DSL was still delivering 1 Mbps). His technology was premature in that there wasn’t any good technology at the time for bringing fast broadband to the curb.

As usual there will be those that jump all over this news and declare that we no longer need to build fiber. But even should one of these companies develop and perfect the best imaginable wireless technology there is still going to have to be a lot of fiber built. All of these new attempts to develop wireless last mile technologies share a few common traits that are dictated by the nature of wireless spectrum.

First, to get good the kind of big bandwidth that Google wants to deliver, the transmitter and the customer have to be fairly close together. Starry is talking about a quarter mile deliver distance. One characteristic of any wireless signal is that the signal weakens with distance. And the higher the frequency of the spectrum used, the faster the signal deteriorates.

Second, unless there is some amazing breakthrough, a given transmitter will have a fixed and limited number of possible paths that be established to customers. This characteristic makes it very difficult to connect to a lot of customers in a densely populated area and is one of the reasons that wireless today is more normally used for less densely populated places.

Third, the connection for this kind of point-to-multipoint network must be line of sight. In an urban environment every building creates a radio ‘shadow’ and block access to customers sitting behind that building. This can be overcome to a small degree with technologies that bounce the signal from one customer to another – but such retransmission of a signal cuts the both the strength of the signals and the associated bandwidth.

However, Google has already recognized that there are a lot of people unwilling or unable to buy a gigabit of bandwidth from them on fiber. In Atlanta the company is not just selling a gigabit connection and is hitting the street with a 100 Mbps connection for $50. A good wireless system that had access to the right kind of spectrum could satisfy that kind of bandwidth to a fairly reasonable number of customers around a given transmitter. But it would be technically challenging to try to do the same with gigabit bandwidth unless each transmitter served fewer customers (and had to be even closer to the customer). A gigabit wireless network would start looking a lot like the one I saw year ago in Virginia where there was a transmitter for just a few nearby customers – essentially fiber to the curb with gigabit wireless local loops.

But if Starry can do what they are shooting for – the delivery of a few hundred Mbps of bandwidth at an affordable price will be very welcome today and would provide real competition to the cable companies that have monopolies in most urban neighborhoods. But, and here is where many might disagree with me, the time is going to come in a decade or two where 200 Mbps of bandwidth is going to become just as obsolete as first generation DSL has become in the twenty years since it was developed.

Over the next twenty years we can expect the full development of virtual and augmented reality so that real telepresence is available – holographic images of people and places brought to the home. This kind of technology will require the kind of bandwidth that only fiber can deliver. I think we’ll start seeing this just a few years from now. I can already imagine a group of teenagers gathering at one home, each with their own headset to play virtual reality games with people somewhere else. That application will very easily require a gigabit pipe just a few years from now.

I welcome the idea of the wireless last mile if it serves to break the cable monopoly and bring some real price competition into broadband. It’s a lot less appealing if the wireless companies decide instead to charge the same high prices as the incumbents. It sounds like the connections that Starry is shooting for are going to fast by today’s standards, but I’m betting that within a few decades that the technology will fall to the wayside – like every technology that doesn’t bring a fast wire to the home.

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Technology The Industry

Starry Shooting for Wireless Last Mile

Chet Kanojia, the man behind Aereo, is back with another industry play. He has founded Starry, a company that promises to deliver very fast internet speeds – up to a gigabit – wirelessly. Where his last play took on cable TV competition, he is now going after broadband providers.

Starry intends to tackle this by combining multiple frequencies to provide a direct link between a customer and a tower. It’s a really intriguing idea, but I can think of a number of challenges the company has to overcome:

  • This is going to require a complicated antenna array capable of receiving a bunch of different frequencies. But so did Aereo, although this is lot more complicated.
  • The company says it will be using ‘millimeter’ frequencies and short frequencies don’t travel very far. The company says they will need to have towers that are no more than a kilometer apart, and to support this kind of bandwidth those towers will need to be fiber fed. That sounds like a challenge in a world where people fight against new towers. But this might work well in a downtown with plenty of highrises to use as transmitter locations. Starry says they are shooting to cover 20% of the public and that infers only bringing service to major metropolitan areas.
  • Those kinds of frequencies and bandwidth don’t travel well through walls or much of anything else. The Starry website shows their receiver will sit in a window. These kinds of frequencies will require a direct line-of-sight and in an urban area that can get problematic since it’s easy for a building to be in a radio ‘shadow’ if there is another building between it and the tower. Starry is going to rely on customer self-installation and I foresee a number of customers who go through the process only to find out that they can’t see the transmitter. Rooftop outdoor antennas would enable a lot more customers to get service, but would also require a fleet of technicians.
  • Distance really matters with very high frequencies and a customer close to a tower will be able to get much faster speeds than one only a relatively short distance further away (like a quarter-mile).

This is obviously only an urban solution because the network needs multiple fiber-fed transmitters. The first market is going to be Boston. The company says that they will sell broadband for significantly less than the competition but has not yet announced the pricing. The company will require customers to buy a $350 proprietary router that enables the technology. Their only product for now is broadband so this is going to be aimed at those who want a lot of speed and aren’t dependent on the cable company bundle for cable TV. If they can make this work they ought to get a lot of interest.

I saw a few other articles about Starry that worried that their would be regulatory pushback from the cable companies. But as long as Starry uses frequencies in ways that the FCC has approved, then there doesn’t seem to be any potential way to push back against this. Their biggest regulatory hurdle will be getting cities to agree to the many needed towers, but there are no state or federal rules that I can think of that can be used to stop such a wireless deployment. The country is already full of WISPs and they are relatively free to deploy wherever they want.

The company has some significant financial backers including FirstMark Capital and Barry Diller’s IAC, Tiger Global, KKR, HLVP and Quantum Strategic Partners. So certainly they have convinced those investors that the technology works. The concerns I listed above are mostly about deployment and if the company can find a make this easy to use for enough customers then they might have something.

Certainly nobody is going to be upset (other than the cable companies) to see another broadband competitor in urban markets. It’s something the country badly needs. We have entered an era where the big ISPs are competing on speed but not on price. In fact, the introduction of data caps is threatening to jack up the prices a lot more for large data users. It would be good to see a low cost alternative as a way to bring some price competition into the market.

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