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December 5, 2007...It isn't easy keeping up with which "new" standards in the telecom sector currently rule, but one principal always seems to apply. Standards and "standard leaders" will change, so flexibility in strategy is key. The fact that basically all of today's telecom companies continue to run in lean/mean mode makes agility easier, because those on the perpetual slim-fast diet are always quicker to respond to whatever whims the current sales climate demands. The other given is that the world will always want higher speed transmission with less connectivity hassle, and believe it or not, the 70GHz and 80GHz spectrums are already being seriously deployed... and that translates to what the compounds do especially well, i.e. super-fast millimeter wave speeds.

First of all, there's a new three-letter abbreviation in the lexicon: LTE. It stands for "Long Term Evolution" which I find pretty silly given that virtually everything the advanced semiconductor business does has to do with long term evolution. No matter how rapidly you think the ruling class might adopt your new fangled idea, reality is that it will take much, much longer for it to actually happen. The new catch term "LTE" (which is really a protocol) is evidently being promoted by those who group themselves as GSM. Historical trivia note: GSM actually stands for "Groupe Speciale Mobile", which was originally formed back in 1982 by what was called "the Confederation of European Posts and Telecommunications" or CEPT, the goal of which was to design a pan-European mobile technology. The GSM Association, a.k.a. GSM World, now claims close to 2.5 billion GSM customers... not all of whom are satisfied.

GSM and WiMAX (which, if you didn't know it, stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) appear to be the most prevalent terms, with 3G (short, of course, for "3rd generation") still appearing a lot. (Whatever happened to the other generations? Is LTE the 4th and beyond?) GSM calls WiMax "complementary" to what they champion and the GSM Association is behind what they call "the post 3G LTE" wireless cell standard, and they seem to want to seriously limit WiMAX to just backhaul. The group met recently in Geneva and laid out their latest strategies. (Ref: meeting coverage via GSM World's website). The WiMAX "complementary" bit was a result of GSM's mid-November meet in Macau (Ref: IOP's CS magazine coverage). From what I can gleam from all this typical mumbo jumbo, they haven't yet understood what's really cool, which is where our CS world's beloved MMICs are headed next. And in case you're new to the compounds, MMICs stand for Millimeterwave Microwave Integrated Circuits. (So few people will take the time to unravel these ridiculous acronyms and abbreviations for newbies ...you're welcome!)

Enter two USA companies, GigaBeam Corporation of Durham, North Carolina and NextPhase Wireless of Anaheim, California. GigaBeam has a core product they call WiFiber, which is evidently at the heart of the cool. According to their boilerplate, WiFiber allows customers to bypass the restrictive telecom oligopoly and connect directly to any city's fiberoptics hub or Point-of-Presence (POP). The "disruptive impact" of an easily deployable, low cost alternative to fiberoptics cables is difficult to overestimate, especially since WiFiber's point-to-point high-speed units transmit data via the highest approved radio frequency at speeds equal to 641 T1 lines or 1000 DSL lines. Doug Lockie (formerly of Pacific Monolithics and Endgate/Endgate fame) is a co-founder of GigaBeam and was one of the pioneers who pushed through acceptance of the 70GHz and 80GHz spectrum. Doug knows his MMICs and with his military background, is familiar with the power of hugely higher spectrums. Current GigaBeam aficionados include Google, Verizon, ING, Sprint, and the Department of Defense, as well as several cities and universities, including San Francisco and Boston University. GigaBeam intends to expand into major metropolitan areas around the world. Let's hope they can actually do it.

NextPhase bills itself as having the mission to build a device-agnostic, WiMAX-ready, wireless broadband connectivity/content delivery platform serving all 48 contiguous U.S. states (Whew! Now that's a mission). They're currently designing, deploying, and operating their own WiMAX-ready wireless networks to both businesses and municipalities, especially in California and Nevada. NextPhase and GigaBeam have recently announced the formation of a joint venture to collaborate on building a 70 GHz and 80 GHz wireless network in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California. The network will utilize GigaBeam's WiFiber links. These used in tandem with other GigaBeam wireless technologies, will enable NextPhase to offer its customers in that region business class connectivity services at broadband speeds up to 1 Gbps. (Ref: Nov. 26 news release).

The thing that's especially important about all this, in my opinion, is the technology behind what GigaBeam is offering. This is all about the new 71-76 GHz, 81-86 GHz, and 92-95 GHz frequency bands (13,000MHz), which have recently been approved by the USA's Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These are evidently the only bands that will enable carrier-grade multi-gigabit-per-second communications for the entire "last mile." This enables reliable point-to-point two-way communications at up to 2.7 Gbps with 99.999% weather availability for about a mile or more throughout most of the US. Future systems will enable last-mile communications at 10 gigabits per second or OC-192.

And what makes it all especially interesting is the process that was entailed getting the FCC to open these spectrums. Airwaves aren't a bit free anymore, and as one may have concluded by now, the USA government has the audacity to think they, and they alone, have power to control said airwaves. It's kind of like the Internet. Those absurdities aside, take a look at the explanation on GigaBeam's website detailing the process the company's co-founders, Louis Slaughter and Doug Lockie had to go through to get this far in the game. It's a great lesson in hitting your head against a brick wall and, for once, coming out the winner.

The government approval process Lou and Doug went through is reminiscent of way back, many years ago, when Anadigics' co-founder, Ron Rosenzweig first started lobbying the government for HDTV, which brings us back to the original thesis of this commentary. No matter how wonderful your advanced technological solution is, and no matter how much the world wants/needs it, you can be sure that it'll take much, much longer to deploy than you ever dreamed. Why? Because the "powers that be" love to build brick walls, often just for the pleasure of watching you run up against them. But hey, we're all finally running out this holiday season pricing the new HDTV sets. Sooner or later (and it'll probably be later), we'll all be communicating at the warp GHz speeds only advanced MMIC technology can provide.

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