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AT&T Wireless Drops Fixed Wireless
n8twj writes: "According to this story at Internetnews.com, AT&T has decided to graciously bow out of the Fixed Wireless arena. This is a move that strands 47,000 of its customers, displaces its entire fixed wireless division staff and costs the company more than $1 billion." Iridium, Ricochet, and Sprint's ION are now gone or all-but-gone, too -- it's been a bad year for unconventional Internet service customers.
How long before the broadband group gets scrapped too? First excite, then who knows?
"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." ~ Emo Phillips
"Fixed wireless never really found a home at AT&T, however. [...] it was lumped in with AT&T Wireless,
/n./ 1. Corporate power elites
...'."
a company that's had problems of its own since going public."
Seems like The Mgmt screwed up here. Someone couldn't decide what to do with it...
":management:
distinguished primarily by their distance from
actual productive work and their chronic failure
to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively,
as in '*Management* decided that
--
Frist post brought to you by The Management!
:wq!
no wireless in the uk? www.tele2.co.uk would disagree!
i don't want all my activities being broadcast for any tom dick and harry to snoop, no matter how fast it is.
How many of the so called dot-com bombs were not really failures ? One problem of the way we plan business in the USA is our short-termism.
In Japan, corporations like sony etc have plans that take in the next 20 years!
I'm not really surprised that the uptake of these wireless services did not make big $$S. Its a shame, but I expect we will see a similar technology emerge from the ashes.
Just get a cable modem or DSL, get a base unit and broadcast a net. Get a couple of your buddies to do the same and voila! Instant wireless net.
Given the current telecomms climate, I expect that they'll be given the industry standard mentoring and advisement program:
"The door's over there. Don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out."
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How much demand is there for fixed wireless? I've been considering starting a wireless ISP that would serve my local area, and I was thinking that no one would be willing to pay more money to switch from cable or DSL to wireless. This is what could have been the problem.
Maybe if AT&T deployed only in rural areas...
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
"Digital Broadband" (fixed wireless) was also deployed by AT&T as a local phone service. People switched over from their local telco to AT&T and now will have to switch back.
AT&T has similarly offered local phone service in my area over cable. I have cast a very skeptical eye towards this offering, not because of the potential for higher cost or lower quality, but because of AT&T's propensity to launch into new services, fail to make money and then cut their losses leaving the customer high and dry.
In Japan, corporations like sony etc have plans that take in the next 20 years!
Yes, but the Sony Plan 2001, which was developed 20 years ago (1981) had us all using Beta and VHS totally phased out.
Good managers plan in advance and have a long term view. AT & T was built by good management. Unfortunately, they do not have good management now.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Many times on slashdot (or elsewhere, I hear the words "Just get a cable modem or DSL". Well, dammit, for many of us, that is not a possibility.
I live in one of the most well-connected areas of the country, and probably in the world. UUNET, AOL, MAE-EAST, and countless others are located out here. My county also has one of the oldest Cable-TV plants in the country. I live in one of the fastest growing sections of the county, and our CO is both overburdened and too far from my house for DSL.
In short, Fixed Wireless, had it even been available here, is the ONLY reasonable broadband option for me. (I'm not prepared to deal with satellite latencies).
People need to realize that losing these alternative systems is a phenomenally Bad Thing. I fully expect that in 2 years (just as the next-generation DSL that might have finally gotten me service comes online, maybe) DSL will be provided in my area by Verizon, and Verizon alone, and they won't bother upgrading, so I'll still have no DSL. And as for cable -- well, that *might* work, maybe, but I'll never get static IPs or a server-friendly AUP.
Sure, I might not have had that with Wireless, either, but with more competition, especially from different media, there'd be more service-level competition for DSL, and more urge to expand and improve service. With no competition, well, why bother?
It constantly depresses me, the state of technological affairs in this country. For pete's sake, we invented (more or less, perhaps) DSL, the Cell Phone, and countless other incredibly cool or useful technologies. But because "competition" and "the marketplace" is so vitally important to us (or at least to our well-funded politicians), we don't have any standards, we have incomplete rollouts, we have lousy service, and Microsoft.
And the worst of it is, most of the public at large doesn't realize that it doesn't have to be like this! We accept BSODs because, well, computers crash, don't they? We accept lousy DSL service because, well, we're running out of IPs, and we don't have any backbone fiber left, right? We accept reduced cell phone services because it's great that we have a choice between CDMA and TDMA and GSM, right? Geez.
Sorry for the rant. It's been a bad morning for me so far.
So, let's say, for the moment, that a bunch of smart geeks running a non-profit ISP were to get together and start an 802.11-based fixed wireless service. How much, really, would that cost? Where would we get startup money? If we're going to serve 50, 100, or 1000 subscribers over a 2-10 Mbps connection, is it really resonable to have only a single T-1 on the back side? How do we afford a fatter pipe, if the subscribers are willing to pay half the cost for fewer services over cable?
In short, we need these big businesses to build out these networks, to dip into their funds and live with losses for a couple years. We simply cannot do this ourselves.
If anyone knows how we can do it ourselves, please let me know, 'cause I know a bunch of smart geeks at a non-profit ISP who would love to do exactly this.
47,000 customers? I'm shedding tears. Wireless
inet is hardly a do or die thing to anybody, nor the
economy. Really. When even the library has data ports, how long is anybody really away from net access that it truely makes a difference?
This was not all it was cracked up to be. First, the pricing (about $35/month with free long distance intrastate) was only guaranteed for one year. Pricing could then go to whatever they wanted to charge. Also, in this area anyway, they came in too late to compete with other accepted technologies for Internet access -- cable, ISDN, and DSL.
Personally, I would like to see cable expanded to more rural areas and everything go to cable modem and eventually cable telephones.
Click here or here.
So at least people will have time to sort out the details, and figure out alternatives.
It seems like they learned something about the bad PR of instant shutdowns.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I once owned an ISP, but sold it, due to the costs involving the 56k upgrade. That was five years ago and now it seems that dial up is on it's way back. Does anyone know if there will be a speed increase due to new technology for dial up consumers?
I wish they offered services such as these in my area; I am stuck with one-way cable which has slow upload and still uses the phone line :(
I work for a small ISP that just rolled out wireless broadband, and the response has been excellent. With the number of people who have signed up for service, the business offering will definitely not be a money losing venture. I can only imagine that a complete and utter breakdown in management skill is the plague that effects AT&T. Of course we're not going to try to take over local phone service or other extraneous services, because we're an Internet company...maybe AT&T should find a focus and stick to it, and stop trying to be everything to everyone...sounds like some other companies I know...
the people wander around and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows.
A very large number of the dot-com bombs were really failures. They were failures because they were set up by people with a short-term aim to live off gullible VC cash for a while.
The real problem with the wireless world is that it costs megabucks to build the infrastructure, but the stuff it is delivering is only worth toy prices. It's the same with mobile phones. People only buy stuff like this when they can do it out of petty cash.
We've got a group of people at my workplace that could use Wireless Internet access now...but it needs to be pervasive. They analise and evaluate gasolene storage tanks througout the state of Colorado.
So is there ANY way for them to do that, statewide, with a live internet link? Or do we have to assume that doesn't exist and cache the data until signal is available?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
What fixed wireless providers remain in the country-- specifically on the East Coast? The wonderful guys who host my space (mia.net!) provide it locally to them in Wisconsin, but I don't know of anyone who does it in New York. Any suggestions?
"It's OK, my sheet's got a hole in it!"
I worked for a pure fixed wireless business on www.tele2.co.uk as a salesman and marketing manager. The problem is that there is so much fibre buried and phone lines already installed, that a new service struggles to cover even its operating costs. In most urban areas, the cheapest way to move data is to use existing infrastructure. Once you leave the city centre, trees obstruct fixed wireless so complaints rise every Spring of installations that were done in December-Febuary no longer being viable. This leads to a uninstalls along with a bad reputation. It destroys margin on sales.
Fixed wireless is a superb technology but the existing technologies make it very hard to deploy it econmoically.
Patrick
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
This service was sold in my area when it came out (parts of Dallas/FW)
I can say, without reservation, that the service completely sucked. AT&T rolled this thing out prematurely and then attempted to "fix" the bugs after the fact. Every single person I know who had this service cancelled it after the first few months.
Downloads were often slower than 56k (yes, you heard that correctly). For some unknown reason, they put these fixed wireless customers on the same network as the dial-up Worldnet Network. The result was that ping times to the wireless gateway (ie: the pole) were GREAT. Once you got into AT&T's worldnet network, however, forget about it. They sucked.
Basically, the technology was somewhat there (indicated by the great performance from the dish to the pole) but once you got onto the worldnet network, it killed any hopes of "high speed". To this day, I still have no idea why they butchered this so bad.
Faxes machines and standard modems did not work either over the fixed wireless phone lines....and I won't even mention the abysmal support that came with it.
At the time (almost 12 mo. ago), there were many reports of tech support reps not knowing what a ping time was. I guess thats not surprising, given, it's AT&T.
The Department of Defence helped bail out the Iridium system and is offering phones and service to all US Governmnet agencies with discounts and, if needed, encryption. It's not all but dead.
I just purchased a Motorola 9505 phone and was able to talk to my pilot yesterday from my cell phone while he was flying over the middle of the Pacific. He used it to keep in touch with the FAA controlers while out of radio contact.
IMHO Iridium gives the military access to a satellite system without having to put one up. I think that it will stay around.
Nate
Typical AT+T Bullshit (damn, I might be modded down, but this is the truth).
Remember NorthPoint? I had a rock solid DSL connection, an employee discount with MSN as an ISP (back when i worked at the RatShack), and 1.3Mb/s down. AT+T came along and bought NorthPoint and left how many thousands hanging? Like I said, nothing new. AT+T has no respect for customers, and will shut off vital services at a whim, with little or now warning (I had 2 days).
Just my 2. I'll stick with DirecTV DSL for now.
"AT&T has decided to graciously bow out of the Fixed Wireless arena."
What is gracious about leaving the 47,000 customers stranded?
graciously bowwing out, would involve keeping all the current customers, and not accepting new customers or customer moves.
Need a Catering Connection
Fixed Wireless, which combined high speed access with telephone services, had worth to AT&T as a hedge against lost market share in LD and in their dial-up ISP Worldnet; it also was meant to stand as a building block in their "all services, any distance" strategy.
With Wireless spun off, the new company is not interested in the high-speed access market, unless there's immediate profit in it. And there isn't. AWE will do better without it; they surprised the market yesterday by showing some black ink.
Not directly related, but of interest in how quickly these things can pan out (or wash out), here's Michael Armstrong's ambitious plans for combining AT&T services and how it failed.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I for one think it is better that the big guys are getting out of the wireless internet service. It gives incentive for us little guys to get off our duff and start setting up relays and access points.
Was it from a need or a business standpoint?
How many other times have parent companies closed "lesser" earning holdings so that they can take a tax write-off on the "failing" business to off-set the windfall profits they made earlier in the year. The business world sucks because everything comes down to the bottom line. How much money can we make for our own pockets and our stockholders. I've been on both sides of this and when it was money in my pocket I raved about how good business is. After being on the consumer side of things, it blows.
How many of us were changing our Telco's weekly when they were passing out checks to switch? I must have bounced between MCI, ATT, and Sprint five or six times in one month. But when the checks stopped I went with the lowest costing company.
Yes, it's frustrating, but until someone comes up with a better idea I think it will continue.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
What about it was gracious? Leaving so many customers stranded doesn't sound too gracious to me.
Just to check out the feasibility of something like this, after seeing all the cost speculation on here, I decided to give a call to the local Sprint office. Here's what I've found:
Full T1 line, terminating in my residence, I provide CSU/DSU and routing equipment:
Installation Fees waived with a 12 month contract, unlimited IP addresses assigned from Sprint pool. Total Monthly recurring cost is $300 for the local loop and $881 for the T1 port fee.
So, compare this with my cable modem at $50 a month, and I'd need 24 users to break even- if I don't provide equipment, beyond the AP and antennas I already own. But to get to 24 people, I'm going to need a few thousand dollars worth of investment to set up the infrastructure to provide for a wider service area.
Tower space can be expensive if you don't know where to look. In the small town I live in, people needed TV towers to get anything back in the pre-cable days. This included alot of businesses that felt the need for some type of communications. There are alot of bars, auto parts stores, empty buildings, etc. with some pretty hefty structures attatched. I have had success in negotiating near-free installation of equipment on those towers (I pay their electric bill one month out of 12.. In one case, I'm pretty sure they're losing money on the deal, because I'm using way more than 1/12 of the electricity to keep my boxen running)
Of course, as long as you only need a little lift - say under 200 feet - you can legally fly a balloon with a few tight moorings and any equipment you need. (If you live too close to an airport, the legal limit is lower than 200 feet.)
That could be a maintenance un-friendly installation though. It'd be a hell of alot of fun to try though.. Think Helium line running up alongside coax and power feeds. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
As a user of Ricochet for a year (in NYC) I'd say the fact that there is no viable hi-speed wireless is a shame.
If there was any one tech in the last five years that really changed my day to day lifestyle, it was having 128kb Ricochet service.
My office became a flexible thing, taking the bus changed from being a slow death to one of the most productive parts of the day. The work day became much more granulated and disbursed though the 24 hours.
I wish public Wi-Fi was the answer but I'm doubtful. (but I do plan to try to set up a couple of nodes)
If only all the displaced users of all the dead services could coalesce in to one market space.
sigh...
Iridium was bought out by a small company to service the large Department of Defence and US Governement contracts. The revenue from the US government is much larger that the cost to keep the Iridium constelation in orbit and in good repair. Becuase the 'new' Iridium dosen't have the debt burden of the old system - they can provide service at $1.50 a minuit. I use their service when I hike in the woods and need to keep in contact with my customers. The phones have been re-flashed and the voice quality is quite acceptable - it sounds like you're slighly muffeled, and now the phones can connect directly to the internet (unfortunatly only Windows is supported) in addition to connecting to an ISP. You can also send SMS messages to the phone.
Because the new service has almost no dept and plenty of revenue, I don't worry about them going bankrupt.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I have to say that it fits with all my other experiences with AT&T though. They are the cable TV provider in my area and they suck. The picture quality is even worse than the channel selection they "offer", and in fact is exceded in lack of quality only by their customer service. If I could get any reception with an antena at my house I would drop them entirely. Unfortunately I just can't justify the expense of DSS with as little TV as I watch.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I live near Baltimore, a pretty large city. I cannot get cable-tv (because the co-ax in my building sucks), let alone cable modem service or DSL. Why are services like this, rocoshet, or others not avalable when there are still people like me out there who want service?
Anyone who posts about bad moderation are themselves off-topic and should be moderated accordingly.
As an employee in the software dept of the sprint BWG (Broadband Wireless Group), I can also tell you that our devision has been hit by massive layoffs and we are expected to bring a halt to our over 50,000 customers within the next 6 months. Installations and future marketing plans have already been canceled.
The various pieces that have been assembled into AT&T Broadband began making that investment and deploying cable modems more than five years ago. Currently we have about 1.5 million subs paying for high-speed data (through the @Home and RoadRunner services). If you look through some of the detailed financial information that has been released as part of the proposals to split Broadband off from the rest of AT&T, you find that high-speed data became cash-flow positive -- that is, the revenue is now sufficient to pay for current operations, new installs, and the cost of the incurred debt -- just this year.
Neither the wireless services, nor the DSL resellers, were signing customers up fast enough to reach that point for at least several years, if ever. For a long time, broadband service is going to come from very large companies, probably with existing networks (originally built for other purposes) who can afford to wait several years for the service to become profitable.
Although the demise of Sprint ION was much heralded, I receive an E-mail from Sprint Broadband (SBB) the following day that informed me that SBB would no longer be accepting any new customers, either Business or Consumer. You can see for yourself at http://sprintbroadband.com/
This is a bummer really, as, since Sprint figured out how to do wireless, my service really cranks: 2Mbps down, and 500 Kbps up. Great Stuff. Unfortunately, I had to slog through 7 or 8 months of speeds slower than dial-up.
What really gets me about all of this is the contest between SBB, MCIW and AT&T. They were all out there buying up all the MMDS licenses they could. First, MCI bails out of the deal they were putting together with SBB a couple years back. SBB goes ahead and rolls out the service, and cannot meet demand. AT&T never really got off the ground.
One must ask, who put whomever in charge at these telco's? SBB makes $50 a month off of me and several thousand other people (and $150/month off of hundred's of business') in the 'Springs alone, and they cannot pay for the antenna's and equipment? Heck, it is even their fiber that serves the distribution antenna, so no cost to transport my packets is really incurred by having to lay cable to my house, or to they distribution antenna. Their revenues are about $1.8 million/year just in this area and they are suspending service aquisition. It is just a matter of time until they cut it off in whole. With a 35 mile reach, I would be trying to get as many people as possible onto this service. It is WAY cheaper than DSL to setup and support.
But hey, I am only the Capacity Planner at a teleconferencing company with a high growth rate, a large customer base, and lots of income. What do I know?
EOR (end of rant)
Gerald Roebke
With sprint axing their ION dev too, I have to wonder what that means for their current fixed wireless broadband customers (i.e. me). After the announcement about ION last week, I got an email from them saying they're not doing any new installs, but current customers would not be affected. This seems to tell me it's only a matter of time before they shut the rest down too. To be honest, sprint service sucks, but I refuse to use @home cable after working there for a stint (grudge). Dsl isn't available to my house either. I hate to think im going to be nating 8 servers at home though a dialup again. It's a shame the managerial screwups that have killed these operations are causing a repression/ regression of technology, but it does appear to be in effect. Maybe if we're lucky aol or microsoft will buy them all out and run them right!
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.
I have fixed wireless Internet access, and I'm not impressed with the company. For $120 a month (after tax) I'm supposed to get 1Mbps in both directions, a static IP, and unlimited bandwidth. What a deal, right? Well...
First, it took them 3 months to install the thing after many promises. They never returned phone calls (still don't for the most part). It would have taken longer but I pitched a huge fit and ended up on the phone with their CEO. The install cost $300 and came with a 1 year contract. This was back in March of this year. (oh, and that $300 was just an install fee: They still own the equipment.)
The first two months, the service was slow. I was lucky to get 100Kbps, one tenth of my bandwidth. Their techs told me my antenna wasn't getting a strong enough signal, but they refused to move it for me (they installed it in the first place!). So I spent $40 on a nice tripod-mount mast for my roof and moved the antenna up high, pushing my signal rate through the roof. The bandwidth didn't increase one bit, and after some investigation, I found out they had a tiny pipe (I'm told a single T1) serving a few hundred customers.
Then, they switched providers and my bandwidth jumped. I still wasn't getting my full 1Mbps, but it came pretty damn close most of the time (usually between 700 and 900Kbps), so I was satisfied. About a month ago they lost their high speed pipe and went back to the slow crap, and my bandwidth dropped to ~80Kbps. I pitched another fit, ended up on the phone with the CEO, and got half off this month's access. Right now, the bandwidth is a little better, but most of the time I'm still below 500Kbps and I'm still paying $120 a month for it. Friends in the know tell me they're running out of venture capital, fast.
I have no other choices for broadband. Qest doesn't give a damn about DSL and has no plans to roll it out in my area. Cable modem service from Charter Communications has been "on it's way" now for three years, and they keep pushing it back. Now it's "sometime in 2002." The next county (literally 5 minutes away) is served by Verizon and they have DSL that works great - if you can get service. It's so spotty that out of a couple dozen people I know who want it, only two actually can get it.
Wireless broadband is the only solution out here, but unfortunately, it seems to be run by people who don't exactly know what they're doing. Why they can't make it work with as many customers as they have is beyond me, but I'm surprised they haven't been sued for false advertising yet. They're still advertising bandwidth between 1Mbps and 10Mbps for various prices, but if they can't even keep up with the 1Mbps how the hell are they going to sell a 10Mbps link?! The answer: They can't.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I'm not technically gifted here... but I have a question. What would stop people putting these up WITHOUT internet access, creating small local networks for trading data between people in the neighborhood, and hooking these neighborhoods up together to to make regions, and then linking regions to make vast conglomerates. we could build a network composed of hundreds of thousands of individuals with NO trunk lines NO gateways and NO ISP's. You wouldn't use it to access the internet, you'd use it to replace it.
I can think of gnutella like software designed to look for and link every signal it can find toegether, and then have every single computer act as server. This could also allow every computer linked this way to share resources like the way the SETI screensaver works, meaning every one attached gets a screaming fast data-crunching monster.
Help out a technically challenged person here. Why won't it work?
Iridium was hardwired as a voice system, and an expensive one w/ funky handsets that often didn't work inside, and never had any Internet play.
This appears to have confused some people, especially since the lead story is wrong.
AT&T Wireless is not AT&T Broadband (formerly TCI.) They do PocketNet which allows network access from your phone, but that isn't the same thing.
Management is still clueless, however, since they denied us a bonus because of turnover on the Prepaid plans. (Does anybody think Prepaid is a good deal?) Or maybe they aren't clueless and just want to screw the employees to help the next quarter's profit line. (There's been a lot of belt-tightening since we split off from AT&T.) Probably typical in the current economic climate.
Yay!
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Parodon the "anonymous coward" post, but you'll soon see why..
I spent several years working for AT&T Fixed Wireless, and thought I'd address a few comments I saw here.
1: FWS didn't use some of the industry-standard FWS tools and systems available from companies like Cisco - They developed their own technology.
2: The product offered not only 1 Mb of data (eventually spec'ed to 2Mb) but up to four voice lines.
3: The company is certainly NOT abandoning their customers and pulling a Northpoint. They are taking the time to exit the business gradually, working with customers to move their service back to the local carriers without interruption