Fixed Wireless Business

DIRECWAY Touts WISP Alliances

DIRECWAY, the broadband Internet offering of Hughes Network Solutions, is being offered to WISPs and other businesses as an alternative backhaul for hotspots.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [August 11, 2003]

Small ISPs across the U.S. and even around the world would like an alternative bandwidth provider. Many continue to rely on the phone and cable companies, who often see ISPs as competitors rather than customers. Enter Hughes Network Systems (HNS) and its satellite Internet product, DIRECWAY.

At the end of last year, Hughes Electronics (HE), parent company of Hughes Network Systems, said in its annual report that it was "pursuing a limited growth strategy for the consumer DIRECWAY business." This appears to mean that the company was stopping advertising and relying on word of mouth to sell the service, cutting customer acquisition costs. E-mails and phone calls requesting further details were not answered—HNS suggested we talk to HE and vice versa. We suspect that, with a lower ad budget, HNS management is now working more closely with channel partners selling the service than it did in the past.

Mahesh Bhave, vice president for new business development at HNS, is enthusiastic about the reseller program for WISPs. "We prefer to work through WISPs, to wholesale to them."

He notes the company can offer its service to any business. "We can also wholesale to owners of multiple RV parks. Our goal is to create the capability for nationwide service for our customers."

He even says the company will entertain offers from ISPs of any size. "We would love to work with them," he says, but sounds a note of caution, adding, "we would love them to look at our offer carefully." WISPs can offer the product under their own name but "powered by DIRECWAY" or they can sell a DIRECWAY roaming agreement.

To that end, HNS has added several services to its DIRECWAY satellite Internet backbone. The suite of services, called Wi-Fi Access powered by DIRECWAY, includes billing, network management, QoS, and more. It provides an end-to-end ("total mile") solution. The idea is that anyone, anywhere, who has customers should be able to offer the service, leaving deployment, management, and billing to HNS.

Hotspots do not require the level of bandwidth provided by optic fiber. Bhave says that even in RV parks, most Wi-Fi hotspots are not heavily used. "For the average customer, 768 Kbps download is the approximate sweet spot. Users will generally experience a range of download speeds from 600 Kbps to 1 Mbps."

At those rates, satellite service should be adequate. Asked about latency problems common to all satellite networks, Bhave countered, "there is a round trip delay to the geostationary satellite, but who's to say that delay is greater than several hops in a wireline carrier network?"

Bhave says that people are finding satellite useful to fill in broadband coverage in all areas, not just rural areas. He claims customers in suburban and even urban settings. He notes, "we focus on customers who don't have access to DSL or cable and have to incur the charges of a T-1 line for broadband access."

Bhave claims the HNS network is designed to exacting principles. "We design for peak load, so that the QoS is good at the peak, and more than adequate the rest of the time. We believe in carrier grade solutions. We supply a total mile solution. All equipment is certified and tested for our network."

He says certified and tested really means that. "We make sure that what we deploy works."

Several RV parks in Southern California are using DIRECWAY for the backhaul for their Wi-Fi service. Customers in rural and remote areas should remain key customers for DIRECWAY. Bhave notes, "we offer a geographical reach that's unsurpassed. We allow service providers to extend into markets they did not think were possible before. And they get to work with the national brand of Hughes and all our partnerships."

—End