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Viodi View Newsletter – April 13th, 2005
Field Trip to the Heartland
By Ken Pyle ([email protected])
One thing that was echoed by telcos in USTA’s Small Company Caucus was the importance of creating a level playing field in terms of regulation. In fact, it was stressed by several of the speakers that the best way to help the independent telcos serve their customers would be to unshackle them and their competitors from needless regulation. Another take-away is that it is important for telcos to devise partnerships where the workload is shared, so that the sum of the telcos capabilities is greater than the individual entities. You will be able to hear this and more, as soon as USTA gets the presentations and associated audio online in the next few days.
As good as these recordings are, they still do not substitute for actually being at this day and a half summit. To hear Walt Clay and Tom Dahl talk about what they are doing is always good, but to experience their company first-hand is much more exciting. Hutchison’s facility was one of the cleanest I have seen in any setting. My kitchen floor should be a clean as their garage floor. What really was impressive was that their front desk customer service agent gave a flawless overview of Hutchison’s services when asked by someone in the tour.
The tour of the ADC plant in suburban Minnesota was truly impressive. They have retooled the company substantially from the bubble era and gone back to their strengths. What impressed me most about this manufacturing plant was the flexibility in the production of fairly different products, such as splice trays, fiber guides, fiber connector assemblies and wireless radios. It is pretty fundamental manufacturing, as they have machines that take plastic pellets on one end and extrude fiber guides on the other side. The robotics was the most impressive, as the sounds of the machines kept perfect timing and created a sort of manufacturing symphony.
An interesting product manufactured by ADC, is a wireless access point like device that is intended for outdoor application and would work well in conjunction with payphone locations. Wireless was a big part of the agenda for USTA’s 2005 Small Company Caucus. One of the highlights of the Small Company Caucus was the live demonstration of the pre-standards WiMAX equipment that Rockport Telephone is deploying in rural Western Missouri.
They have deployed this technology to extend their voice, data and video service beyond their existing exchange areas and build, what their General Manager, Raymond Henagan, describes as building a “wireless moat” around his existing exchange area. Using frequencies of 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz, they are reaching customers as far as 9 miles away from their tower locations.
Their towers are not exactly towers, as they have found that grain elevators, water towers and existing poles work as great structures for mounting antennas. 70 percent of their home installations require an external flat-panel antenna. The electronics associated with this antenna are powered via the Ethernet cable that connects to the base unit in the house. It takes two hours to install this equipment.
The remaining 30% of their customers are within a mile of a tower and use a small radio which has an internal antenna. With this configuration, self-installs could be possible. Rockport realizes that quality service is their differentiator, so they install the radio and configure the customer’s computer.
Although the intent of their service is “fixed wireless”, they are finding that customers are starting to realize the benefits of portability. For instance, one of their customers installed the radio in his brand new tractor-combine, so he could connect to the Internet while tilling the field. The service worked great, but mixing Internet surfing and tractor driving proved to be incompatible, as this customer drove his tractor-combine into a dirt bank.
Currently, Rockport is providing high-speed Internet and VoIP for business application. They plan on adding residential VoIP, as well as some sort of video services in the future. They realize that they are going to have to compete against themselves, if they are going to compete against the new breed of telecom and information service providers.
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