Wireless News Briefs - June 1, 2000

• New Wave of Price Drops
• IPO is a Breeze
• Taking the Orinoco Route
• Fastest Bridge/Router in the West?

by Gerry Blackwell

You'd have to be blind not to see that fixed wireless broadband, both the licensed and unlicensed varieties, is rapidly entering the telecom industry mainstream. As a result, the market is heating up—as witness these recent developments.

Prices Plunge for 11Mbps Equipment
Wave Wireless Networking, a manufacturer of wireless broadband network equipment, announced recently it had lowered prices by up to 25 percent on its family of 11 Mbps, unlicensed, wireless bridges. Prices now start at $1,995.

Wave, a division of SPEEDCOM Wireless International, sells its SPEEDLAN fixed wireless access products to ISPs, telcos and enterprises. It claims the SPEEDLAN products offer the highest actual data rate of any 11 Mbps product on the market. They operate in the 2.4GHz license-exempt radio band.

The new prices: SPEEDLAN XE 3000, $1,995; SPEEDLAN XE 6000, $2,295; SPEEDLAN MP 3000, $2,700; and SPEEDLAN MP 6000, $3,000.

Wireless IPO Proves Hot Event
Meanwhile, Wave competitor BreezeCOM Inc. announced earlier this month that its recent Initial Public Offering (IPO) was over subscribed by 15 times, resulting in a pricing of $20 per share.

CEO Michael Rothenberg says the offering on April 22, which raised $106 million, was originally supposed to be priced at between $15 and $17 per share. A number of prestigious funds participated in the IPO, Rothenberg says, including PSINet Ventures, a unit of PSINet.

BreezeCOM also released its first quarter results at the begininning of May. It announced a 46 percent increase in revenues from the 1999 first quarter, and a 23 percent increase over fourth quarter revenues.

The Great Outdoors . . . Router
Lucent Technologies recently announced availability of ORiNOCO Outdoor Router client software. Lucent says the new software offers ISPs additional revenue possibilities and better network management.

The client software completes the ORiNOCO Outdoor Solution, which also includes the ORiNOCO Central Outdoor Router (COR) and ORiNOCO Remote Outdoor Router (ROR).

With the Outdoor Router Client (ORC), an ISP can provide residential customers with high-speed unlicensed wireless connectivity at data rates up to 11 Mbps. Lucent says the technology makes especially good sense in rural areas.

The new software is an NDIS Miniport driver that runs on Windows 95, 98, and NT. It allows an ORiNOCO Fixed Wireless PC Card (11 Mbps) to communicate with the Central Outdoor Router (COR).

As many as 96 ORC users can be connected in a central site. The client software also offers bandwidth management capabilities, allowing an ISP to sell a variety of data pipes to customers at various monthly fees.

The ORC supports six different data pipes: 64 K, 128 K, 256 K, 384 K, 512 K, Max K. The data pipes are implemented via the license key. The end customer is not able to change the data pipe.

Existing Outdoor Router customers can download the new software from Lucent's ORiNOCO site.

Riding The Waves A Little Faster
WaveRider Communications Inc., a Canadian-based provider of fixed wireless Internet access products, has introduced a new 11 Mbps addition to its NCL (Network Communication Link) family of bridge/router products.

WaveRider claims the new product is the feature and performance leader in wireless bridge/routers. The NCL1135 provides wireless connectivity for LAN-to-Internet and LAN-to-LAN applications, enabling fast, reliable connections over distances up to 10 miles between corporate computer networks, outlying offices, and the Internet.

WaveRider's more recent LMS (Last Mile Solution) line of products is specifically designed for wireless ISPs, but the NCL products also have applications for ISPs. Several providers—most outside North America—have been using the earlier 1.6 Mbps NCL products to provide point to point-and-point-to-multipoint Internet connectivity for business customers.

The new product uses Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) technology at 2.4GHz. It can be configured as either a wireless bridge or router, supporting learning mode or static routing and RIPv2.

In either mode, the NCL1135 is a fully-managed network device, compliant with SNMPv2 making integration into existing networks easier. The products comes with a full suite of RF (Radio-Frequency) management and installation tools to facilitate rapid and optimal deployment.

—End