* What should you pay for wireless backup?
There are merits to using wireless as a truly diverse back-up circuit to landlines, in that even backhoes can’t “cut” wireless links. The most recently announced wireless back-up service, from Cingular Wireless on its EDGE network, costs $8.99 to $54.99 per month per site, depending on actual data usage.
The $8.99 buys you a half a megabyte, for example, while the $54.99 buys you 50 megabytes. These data volumes are aggregated throughout the 30-day period. However, should one site’s primary link really go haywire one month, it can mooch bandwidth from its sister sites (let’s hope those sites don’t need it later, though).
I find this billing model both intriguing and unusual. The “usage sharing” idea mimics the “pooled minutes” concept that helps large enterprises with the smarts to purchase centralized mobile plans minimize wasted airtime minutes when users across the company share a humongous bucket of minutes.
For fixed wireless services, though, should a network or IT manager have to figure out how much back-up bandwidth each of many distributed sites might need over the course of a month? (“If Site A goes down for 3 minutes on Friday, 8 hours on Tuesday, and half a day on the 14th, this equals about 26M bytes of data likely to be transmitted for the month. That equates to Cingular rate plan X. Now, for Site B….”)
Let’s contrast this approach with wireless back-up services available from wireless broadband service providers TransAria and TowerStream. These companies are more oriented to large sites than the Cingular service, which aims to back up lower-speed (albeit critical) connections.
TransAria, which offers wired and wireless services in six Northwestern states, has a real simple model: Any account with a primary connection from TransAria gets a no-charge wireless back-up link at the same speed via a different route if the primary link is at least 3M bit/sec, says Todd Graetz, Vice President of operations.
For its part, TowerStream, which offers wireless broadband services in five large U.S. markets and plans to reach 10 by early 2006, offers a $175-per-month service whereby a full T-1’s worth of bandwidth sits available in case a primary link should fail, says Jeff Thompson, COO at TowerStream.
For the $175, the site can use 100K bit/sec of the bandwidth on a daily basis and can burst over that amount once, up to a full T-1, during a given month at no extra charge. The second time the site bursts in one month, the site is charged the price of a full T-1 for that month only (about $650).
