WiMAX takes root in Canadian farming town

Hanna, Alberta, has 2,996 people, 16 restaurants, 10 churches, seven motels, and six WiMAX towers.

This rural farming town about two hours northeast of Calgary, adrift on Canada's ocean of 'short grass country,' is on the cutting edge of fixed broadband wireless deployment in North America.

At this week's WiMAX World conference in Boston, multimillion-dollar chip vendors, equipment builders, carriers and network providers will be promising to do what a tiny start-up, Netago Wireless, has already begun in Hanna: deploying Nortel base stations and customer premises gear (called subscriber stations) with radios based on the IEEE 802.16d fixed WiMAX standard.

Netago's plan and early experience suggests the future development of fixed WiMAX in much of North America: affordable, multi-gigabit data services in areas where alternative technologies such as fiber-optic networks and 3G wireless are lacking, inferior or costly.

The value is 'access'

"'Access' is the value in WiMAX -- the last-mile connections," says Tara Howard, an analyst in the broadband access technologies group of market research firm Yankee Group. But activity in the United States for fixed WiMAX is much less than elsewhere in the world, she says. AT&T announced a WiMAX trial last year, for backhaul and disaster recovery applications, and that trial is still ongoing, Howard says.

Mobile WiMAX, based on the 802.16e standard but not due for deployment until late in 2007, will support roughly similar data rates, but at shorter ranges compared to 16d, to client devices in vehicles, analogous to the kind of mobility you get with cellular voice calls today. But the WiMAX Forum hasn't released yet the mobile profiles used to bolster vendor interoperability. And the 16e standard is going through an extensive formal process to correct errors and inconsistencies.

Issues like security and service-level agreements may cause big enterprises to delay the WiMAX embrace, Howard says. "It might be good for certain remote workers, and smaller businesses may find cost advantages in using WiMAX services compared to expensive T-1 connections," she says.

Netago, founded three years ago by its president Terry Duchcherer, has about 70 WiMAX customers, most of them residential but also including a few energy companies that are wringing oil and gas from beneath the region's fields of wheat, barley and rye.

The WiMAX opportunity

Duchcherer worked for telecom companies since 1981. Then in 2002, he saw the start of the province-wide Alberta SuperNet, a high-capacity fiber backbone intended to link government agencies, schools and hospitals to the Internet. And he saw an opportunity. "The backbone doesn't do the last mile [connection]," he says. "That's left to private enterprise." It was the opportunity to bring high-speed Internet access to rural homes and businesses by using broadband wireless.

Initially in 2005, Netago provided a data connection via proprietary radio gear as a stopgap until the IEEE standard was finalized and vendors began delivering WiMAX gear.