Fixed Wireless Business

Balloons, Movies, and Milk in Albuquerque

Whether it's the hazards of ultraviolet light, wind, RF interference, or the "best effort" of the telco, it's all in a day's work at lobo.net, where service is provided to businesses, film shoots, and the local fiesta.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [January 13, 2004]

Founded in 1996, and providing wireless Internet broadband since 1998, Moriarty, N.M.-based lobo.net is no newcomer to the Internet. The company gets its backbone connection through three carriers, and does local exchange through NMIX, whose website has not been updated much since 1998. The company uses T-1 lines to connect individual access points to NMIX.

In the beginning, the company deployed BreezeCom gear using 2.4 GHz spectrum (BreezeCom is now part of Alvarion). Carl Muehlenweg, the company's owner and president, says that every manufacturer has its quirks. BreezeCom makes good equipment but it's expensive and the company seems to make the most radical changes to it. Innovation is impressive, but, says Muehlenweg, "I don't like to buy the first version of anything out of the box." With BreezeCom, that was often what he got, with all the problems that come with new technology.

The popularity of BreezeCom equipment was also a problem. "It was tough to find a supplier with a good price who had equipment in stock," says Muehlenweg.

After trying out Proxim's ORiNOCO equipment (which is probably the cheapest in theory) with KarlNet polling firmware, he settled on Trango Broadband Wireless as his manufacturer. "It was the easiest to deal with in terms of cost and development."

There have been a few small problems, but nothing major. "It's tough to get their dual band equipment to work with their single band equipment. On the other hand, their returns process works smoothly, software versions are readily available, and you can talk to an engineer when you need to," notes Muehlenweg approvingly. Trango supplies everything including PoE in one package.

The company specializes in business broadband. "Most wireless providers are trying to provide low-end cheap wireless in the $30 to $60 per week range," says Muehlenweg. "In that business model, the only way to profit is to oversell it to the point where there are problems with the system."

Lobo.net service starts at $125 per month for a 256 Kbps connection, designed for small businesses. For a higher price, companies can purchase up to 1 Mbps. Burstable speeds are generally double promised speeds, but, he says, "we'll burst up to the full capacity of the cell," which can be up to 8 Mbps depending on the number of T-1s serving the cell.

Described simply, the company's business plan is to use wireless technology to allow small businesses to share the cost of a telco T-1 line.

It has about 34 access points deployed in 15 cells in the towns of Moriarty, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Rio Rancho, with the majority deployed in Albuquerque, where the company claims about 70 percent coverage of the whole town. Muehlenweg estimates that 22 access points are now Trango, with the rest being legacy BreezeCom equipment, and 70 Trango client radios are deployed, with the company adding about 2 wireless clients each week.

The company website says lobo.net hosts about 425 domains, with 150 customers comprising about 4,000 desktop end-users.

Act locally, think micro
A key business strategy has been to deploy what Muehlenweg calls "micro-sites." Essentially, instead of using the full potential range of its access points, the company restricts reception so that each site can handle users within about a mile radius or even less.

Muehlenweg says he has a few rural POPs without noise (noise level of -95 db). In the cities, the noise varies from -90 db to -70 db. In areas where the company is fighting interference, it deploys directional antennas instead of omnidirectional antennas. Trango's equipment uses 60 degree sectors (requiring six antennas to provide a full circle of coverage) and BreezeCom tends to cover 90 degree sectors. Muehlenweg says that when noise is a problem, smaller sectors are better.

Lobo.net has noticed and had to adapt to what Muehlenweg calls "corridors of interference" in the business areas of cities. Business seems to be the main source of interference, such as a retailer who has a warehouse and a showroom some distance apart with a powerful wireless link between the two.

Although in many ways the weather of the Southwest is perfect for wireless broadband (dry, warm, unforested, and not too hilly), the company has faced a few weather issues. "Since we're high up, 5,000 or 6,000 feet, we have high UV, and waterproofing tape can rot in this environment. We retape a connector every few years. Also, for the past six months, we've had wind problems. Antennas that have been up for years without problems have been reoriented by the wind."

The company's outages, however, are generally caused by telcos, not by interference or wind. It must be particularly frustrating when the outage could seem like sabotage, as in the most recent outage lobo.net experienced. "The telco was installing a T-1 in the same building where we already had a T-1 for an access point," says Muehlenweg. "The installer took it upon himself to rewire the pairs on our T-1, and the guy had it backwards."

When power goes out, that can be a problem too. "Two years ago, during the local balloon fiesta, a dump truck hit a power terminal near the festival. We had T-1s feeding the balloon field. We had power backup but there was none on the telco grid."

In spite of the "best effort" of the telco, Muehlenweg says reliability is probably "four nines," which is quite good. In part, he credits reliability to a policy of manageable growth. "We're getting at least two new customers each week, but our model doesn't require a thousand new people at $40 each month. We're not trapped into the problem of being stretched too thin. We have plenty of spares for all of our equipment."

The company also has the resources to tackle special projects. Recently, it helped a film shoot for the upcoming movie Around the Bend directed by Jason Roberts with a cast that includes Christopher Walken and Michael Caine.

The shoot used a film boom, 30 feet high, on which it mounted a Trango radio. Since the shoot was in various locations in Albuquerque, the shoot was able to link to a different access point every time it switched locations. "All business is done by e-mail now, so it was very useful," says Muehlenweg.

Muehlenweg says that the state of New Mexico is trying to lure more movies to the state, offering free use of state facilities and tax rebates on purchases of local services.

Up, up, and away
But the company's biggest project is about balloons. In each of the last four years, lobo.net has provided access to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, whose website is also hosted by lobo.net.

The festival comes to Alburquerque for its unique geography.

It's in a valley. The mountains rise to 11,000 feet above sea level and the city is at 5,000 feet. In the morning, as the valley warms up faster than the mountains, the hot air rises and cold air moves in, creating a southerly wind. But at higher altitudes, the wind is always northerly. So balloons can go South 1 or 2 miles, and then rise to the northerly wind, go North past their starting point, and then drop back down to the southerly wind, returning to the approximate point they took off from.

There's even a perfect location for the festival: a golf driving range. The festival is held every October, which is not peak season for golfing. The range, three-quarters of a mile long by a half mile wide, has plenty of space for the massive balloons. About a thousand can arrive in any year.

The fiesta's LAN handles the registration database, two webcams which post still images of the launch (or "ascension" as it's called) of hundreds of balloons each day, free Wi-Fi for the press, the tracking of balloons, and the updating of the website. "This year, the balloon meister who runs the website had an RV on site and updated the website from there, using a wireless connection," says Muehlenweg.

Be professional
Muehlenweg is currently co-chair of the local professional association, the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association (NMIPA), which boasts about 150 members. The association helps people with inquiries about Internet services, provides training, and intervenes against the telco in local issues.

In all areas, Muehlenweg and lobo.net are practicing simple common sense, but, as he points out, not everyone does so. Companies continue to build out services with unrealistic takeup expectations, unprofitable pricing, and unworkable networks.

Maybe running an ISP is like flying a balloon. It looks effortless when everything's going okay, but when something goes wrong, it takes quick thinking to handle the problem.

Solve a problem, and life will continue as usual, as in this balloon story from 1975 on the fiesta website where, after crash landing a through power lines in a random backyard, the pilot calls his wife to say everything's okay. The response: "When you come home, will you remember to buy a bottle of milk?"

—End