Sparkplug Taps SMBs with Broadband Wireless

It’s the classic conundrum: Small-and-medium businesses and enterprises (SMB/Es, here defined as having between 10 and 300 employees) are notoriously light on in-house IT, heavy on bandwidth usage, and price-sensitive to boot. Service providers wrestle with how to satisfy their needs without throwing their own capex/opex metrics into disarray. The answer? Broadband wireless has one or three.

To wit: Wireless gear can offer a high level of visibility and management along with QoS for applications; can run native Ethernet to scale quickly and incrementally in the way that existing copper solutions cannot; and can be deployed more cost-effectively than provisioning additional copper or trenching fiber for Metro Ethernet service.

Then, there’s also a growing thirst for broadband and the wired infrastructure’s incapability to keep up with the need for it, which is translating to incredible opportunity for broadband wireless.

“Often a customer comes with a simple request: we need broadband,” explained Ben Brimhall, vice president of engineering and network operations at Sparkplug Inc., a service provider that specializes in providing high-speed, dedicated, symmetrical fixed wireless broadband to SMB/Es in several metro areas, including Chicago, Des Moines, Las Vegas, Nashville and Phoenix. “And often they've chosen cable or DSL and think that the five- or six-megabit download bursts offered is going to be fine, but they don't recognize the qualifiers there -- that they’ll only get 384kbps up on a burst level, and that it’s not dedicated access. And T1s can get expensive quickly. Wireless is a natural fit.”

Sandy Gulden, Southwest regional sales manager for wireless broadband government and commercial markets for Motorola Inc., said that for providers, wireless makes sense architecturally.

“You build out your footprint with a point-to-multipoint [solution], like the Motorola Canopy Platform, and your point-to-point backhaul, and perhaps you’re serving police and fire with video surveillance and automatic ticketing with a mesh network, and using something like our Symbol portfolio to provide the end-user gear,” Gulden explained. “All the technologies interplay with each other to form a broad offering for the end customer and community. Infrastructure is infrastructure, and if you have five B-to-B customers, that doesn't mean you have five separate networks. You branch services off one network, which might be a mix of wireless technologies depending on topography, but you have one management system that covers it front to back.”

Wireless, Gulden added, also has a future-proofing advantage for service providers. “The wireless interfaces may change as technology evolves, but the backbone and distribution system will remain the same, so it’s a relatively easy and inexpensive upgrade,” he said. “There are compelling issues here in terms of investing in the future. The network fills the void now and gives a solid one-year ROI on the build, but you won't need to rip it out in a few years and invest $1.5 million in capex to upgrade while stopping traffic for six months to retrench wire.”

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