Project Angel Lives
After a long road full of potholes and potshots, what started out as AT&T's Project Angel has found its way to the starting gate. AT&T Wireless Services (Redmond, WA) will begin offering Fort Worth, TX, residential customers high-speed Internet access and all-distance voice services. Fort Worth is the first of several cities where AT&T will introduce AT&T Digital Broadband fixed wireless service for consumers.
"This is the first test of the post-spin-off wireless group," said Pascal Aguirre, vice president and general manager of GeoPartners Renaissance. Although Fort Worth is a tier-one market, the company will be targeting secondary markets—those with 100,000 to a million in population and below, he said.
Trials & Tribulations
Project Angel was first announced in February 1997 when then CEO John Walter told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners about a plan to win over local markets with wireless local loop technology that would allow it to bypass local incumbents. Since then, the company has run some trials, but little information about the results has been forthcoming. AT&T engineers have busily been working and reworking the technology in the "secret" R&D/manufacturing facility in Redmond, WA, near company headquarters.
Last year, AT&T held a trial with customers in Dallas, which was enough of a success to warrant a commercial offering that is quite different from the original Project Angel, which focused on voice service. The new and improved offering focuses much more on data. An interesting factor is that the company is not going to the rural communities as was originally talked about but instead to the urban areas where they can get their money back faster, said Rebecca Diercks, director of wireless research at Cahners In-Stat Group. "They're going for the consumer play."
Features
The service delivers "always on" high-speed Internet access up to 12 times faster than traditional dial-up modems and offers competitive long distance rates in one package and on one bill. As with cable, the throughput speed depends on how many are using the service at a given time, but Woo said the engineers are comfortable promising 512 kb/s now. The company plans to offer as much as 1 Mb/s by the end of summer and an ambitious 6-8 Mb/s within 18-24 months, and Woo said one site can handle as many as 3,800 homes.
Another benefit of the technology is that it's switch-based, so as those upgrades do come along, the carrier can take care of them without inconveniencing the customer. Woo said the data speeds were 256 kb/s when AT&T began the trial in Dallas, and the engineers were able to upgrade that to 512 kb/s without scheduling service calls. The company also can monitor the system from the network operations center in Seattle, so in the case of a glitch, the carrier would know before the customer.
Costs
The service allows customers to use their current phones and keep their existing phone numbers, supports as many as four phone lines, and provides several of the most popular special calling features. During the initial promotion, AT&T is eating the installation cost. It will provide one free network interface card required for high-speed data services. After that, Diercks said, the company plans to charge around $115 per card. At some point, however, customers are going to have to pony up the cost of the customer premise equipment, which fixed wireless insiders say needs to be below $400 for consumers to bite. Right now, all of the equipment is being produced in the Seattle R&D facility, but the carrier will need a manufacturing partner before it can achieve any economies of scale.
"Right now it costs $700-$750 per house for deployment," Diercks said. "They plan on getting that down to $500 within six months."
How It Works
Voice and data signals are transmitted between nearby base stations and a small antenna installed on the exterior of a customer's home. Line-of-sight between a base station and customer's home is not required. A wire connection is made from the antenna to a control unit in the home. The control unit is then connected to an existing inside phone wiring jack and an AC power supply outlet. Customers selecting the high-speed data service can make voice calls even when they connected to the Internet.
Pricing Options
Customers can select a single voice line with Caller ID, call waiting, and three-way calling services for $25.95 a month. The service includes unlimited local calling, in state long distance rates of seven cents per minute, and seven cents per minute for all direct-dialed state-to-state calls. Additional phone lines are available for seven dollars a month.
High-speed data service is available for $34.95 a month. Internet access, provided by AT&T WorldNet Service, is "always on," so customers do not need to dial-up between online sessions, provided the customer initiates one Internet action within each 24-hour period.
By Ellen Jensen, Managing Editor, Wireless Networks Online