Fixed Wireless Business

A New Breed of ISP

In all the furor about "anti-competitive" municipal wireless buildouts, press reports frequently ignore the fact that private enterprises are starting to specialize in helping municipalities get off the ground, much to the dismay of the heavily subsidized RBOCs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 8, 2005]

San Diego, Calif.-based Rodopi Software, the billing company, put us in touch with one such municipal wireless specialist, Dunwoody, Ga.-based Camvera Networks. On its website, the company notes:

Camvera assists municipalities and other operators to build community networks utilizing state-of-the art wireless technologies. The resulting wireless "footprint" often exceeds 100 square miles for a single system, and integrates effectively with current fiber optic networks.

Camvera recently deployed a system that integrates APs from Richardson, Tex.-based Navini. Navini's not cheap, it's not Wi-Fi (it's proprietary), and it's not even point to multipoint (PtMP).

"They call it massively point to point as opposed to multipoint," explains Walt Henley, Camvera's COO. "It uses eight radios on a phased array to form a beam of radio energy on the CPE. Theoretically, it could deliver up to 1,000 simultaneous beams."

The Navini installed in Adel, Ga. currently has almost 400 subscribers, Henley says. That's pretty good penetration for a town with a population of 5,000.

It's all about getting hundreds of customers simultaneously on the same omni. Of course, there's a price. In this case, it's about $60,000 for the smart radio. "This thing delivers the density on the tower that you need to make money," asserts Henley.

He adds that its proprietary technology accomplishes many tasks not visible to the user such as adjusting the parameters of each beam according to the subscriber's class of service and proximity to the radio.

Better billing is better business
Integration with the billing system makes everything work better. "Some of our municipal markets went from having to touch four different applications on legacy systems to having one application that's browser based," says Elizabeth Zucco, Camvera director of marketing.

Zucco and Henley say that the time required to connect a new user went from hours to minutes, freeing up engineering resources to keep the ISPs running smoothly. CPE can be programmed to connect to the network and a new user can either pick up the CPE at the office or receive it in the mail.

"We've got to be able to plug and play," explains Zucco. "Being able to do sign up on the web is paramount to our future plans for us as a provider. Even though our municipal customers may not know they need it, they need it."

That's why cities need companies like Camvera. Muni wireless opponents argue correctly that cities do not have the expertise to deploy fixed wireless technology and to keep up with all of the improvements and changes. Instead, cities can hire experts like Camvera who do have the knowledge.

Camvera has big plans for the future. "The plan is to sew this thing together," says Zucco. "We want users to be able to migrate between markets seamlessly." Camvera will use Rodopi to enable seamless transitions between markets.

The company is three years old and is aiming for revenues of between $5 million and $8 million this year.

"We're one of the oldest pure wireless integrators," says Zucco. "We've got a lot of experience in multiple technologies, none of which are Wi-Fi." The only Camvera Wi-Fi deployment is the wireless LAN in the company's office.

A clear mission
The company knows what it's good at. "We are good at working with a city or an ISP that wants to add a wireless component," says Zucco. "We focus on suburban and rural areas and prefer to work with unlicensed spectrum, but we can do urban."

"Today we have 14 markets," says Henley. "We're in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Missouri. We started out in Georgia and Alabama and migrated northwest, not northeast, because we feel confident that we know how to get wireless broadband to folks in suburban and rural areas."

Zucco is confident that free enterprise will win out over regulation. "President Bush has declared a clear goal, broadband for everyone by 2007. We're going to have to use wireless to get to places where you cannot use cable, copper, or powerline broadband. We're going to make it happen. Some of our clients may face some changes due to regulation, but we're certain the deployments will occur because people want them and our nation needs them to remain competitive."

—End