Gigabeam advertorial, ghost-written by Sue Tabbitt, for Global Telecoms Business magazine, autumn/winter 2007

The Wireless Fibreer revolution: taking the pain out of last-mile broadband
Why wait years and go bankrupt while trying to lay fibreer to every home, when new radio spectrum licenses pave the way for rapid, cost-effective, Layer 1 services to every user in every city?

As telecoms providers - old, new and would-be players alike - contemplate the dilemma of getting fibreer to the curb or, better still, to the front door, and weigh up the high costs and painfully slow roll-out against where they need to be next week, many will be excited to learn that there is another, much easier way to deliver very fast broadband to businesses and to theinto the home.

High-spectrum radio is a new, highly viable alternative for deploying last-mile very-high-speed connectivity - with unmatched speed to market, and low deployment costs. Better still, it doesn't require the service provider to strike up a local loop relationship with the incumbent telco. All that's needed is a link connection into any local PoP or fiber fibre hotel in any city and, in next to no time, a new entrant could be rolling out a comprehensive network, including the last-mile, fiber fibre-style broadband -, but without wires -, direct to businesses and homes.the home.

The reason more hasn't been heard about this option is its relatively recent approval by communications standards bodies. GigaBeam has led the way in this revolutionary new market, having petitioned the US's FCC to make new radio spectrum bands available, for commercial use in the 71-95 GHz upper millimetreer wave ranges, for commercial use. US authoriszation in 2003 has now been followed by equivalent approvals in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. To take advantage of this new spectrum,exploit the facility, users in the US pay a nominal one-time fee of $700 to operate in the spectrum and thereafter $75 for each for a point-to-point licencse that which has a 10-year term. Licensing approval typically takes aboutjust half an hour because because it is a web- based approval process.less than 24 hours. Similar arrangements are now being replicated internationally.

Through the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz (and potentially 92-95 GHz) frequency bands, telecoms players now have the potential to play with 13 GHz (or 1,3,000 MHz) , compared with the 50Mhz frequency blocks they could previously utilizehad access to previously in the microwave spectrum.they had to work with before. This allows 'true' transport, rather than simply point-to-point or point- to- multipoint access, and offers the potential to create resilient, super-high-speed wireless loops acrossaround entire cities, completely satisfying and feeding consumer demand for real-time, media-rich entertainment and services.

The rise of the WiLEC

Those quick to identify the opportunity are already making great headway. For example, One Velocity in the US, a next-generation Wireless Local Exchange Carrier (WiLEC), is rolling out a high-speed wireless network across Las Vegas, using Gigabeam's WiFiber™WiFiber® 1 gigabitGbps and 100Mbps megabit products., One Velocity. ItThe company has already deployed 33 of our 'WiFiber' links, covering 620 square miles of the region - in just eight months.

Its commercial achievements are nothing short of impressive. In this short time, One Velocity has come to account for one-twelfth of the incumbent provider's capacity, and is able to offer a service at speeds of between 10 Mbps and 2Gbps - at aboutaround 50% discount offof on the incumbent's prices. Even better, it can implement these services in under a week! And, because the service is a Layer 1 offering, without the need for switches, its latency across an area of 6240 sqm is just 0.56ms, compared with the incumbent's 10ms, making it the fastest metro Ethernet network infrastructure across any city in the world!

The ability of One Velocity to come from nowhere and have such a rapid and profound effect on the market provides a powerful example of what's possible. This next-generation player has swept into the market in a matter of months and already has plans to expand to other cities in the across the US.

Its cost models are fascinating too - its projections estimateit is estimated that the total cost of deploying the high-speed last-mile wireless network across the whole of the Las Vegas valley will be $15-20 million - contrasted with the $200 million+ it would have needed to lay down fiberfibre across the area. That's without factoring in the sheer speed to market the company has gained from simply hooking up and switching on a wireless service…

And this is just the beginning. As the new frequency bands are switched on across the world, this model will be replicated by new players in country after country - imagine the potential for the player that gets its hands on London, for example.

The early examples in the US give a good indication of what's to come, a, another WiLEC with grand plans being MetroNext in Boston. Meanwhile, when Google came up against bottlenecks in its WiFi overlay in Mountainview, California, it deployed WiFiber™WiFiber® from GigaBbeam and watched all its lights turn green. Able to cope admirably with peak loads, due to the sheer size of the pipes, the technology quickly overcame Google's performance bottleneck issues overnight..

The technology

WiFiber™WiFiber® is an entirely new concept in point-to-point wireless technology. Gigabeam's WiFiber™WiFiber® G series GigE products provide resilient, high-speed Ethernet connections comparable to physical fiberfibre, but without many of the drawbacks in last-mile scenarios. The technology is fast, reliable, cost-effective and can be rapidly installed or moved. As such, it addresses the requirements of fixed wireless carriers, service providers, enterprises, and government institutions through broadband wireless networks. By providing the last mile access and backhaul, WiFiber™WiFiber® is complementary to both WiFi and WiMax solutions.

This Our robust wireless communications solution is a point-to-point, line-of-sight, wireless high-speed communications link established between two GigaBeam transceiver units. These are linked wirelessly through the alignment of their antennase, and their transmission of data via radio signals in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz spectrum bands.

The WiFiber® system has been demonstrated to deliver data rates atof 1 Gbps -, equivalent to FiberFibre Optic speed. WiFiber Fiber is uniquely robust and highly available (approximately 99.999% in all weather at 1 mile) and can be deployed with very predictable performance based on well- documented weather statistics and proven models from GigaBeam's vast experience in the 70/80 GHz bands.
Our transceiver units are designed to provide wireless link transmission of data at speeds of 1Gbps, equivalent to the transmission speeds obtained with fiber and to transmit that data 99.999% of the time, and with less than 5 minutes of unavailability or downtime per year (ie 'five 9s' availability) in nearly all weather conditions at distances of up to one mile.

The Company isWe are currently testing a soft-switchable 2 Gbps product, t , software swichable, capable of transmitting at 2 GigE, OC48, fiberfibre channel and smpte 292 (streaming HDTV) protocols. The Company has plans. There are also plans for a 10 GigE product in the future.

TheOur robustness of our solutions is partly thanks to the fact that GigaBeam links have a very low probability of interception due to a narrow transmission beam-width (less than one degree). In addition, GigaBeam will provide high security levels by teaming with leading edge encryption providers to further improve security of transmissions.

While GigaBeam's WiFiber™WiFiber® technology is similar to terrestrial fiberfibre in terms of speed and reliability for deployment in metro networks, it boasts a substantial advantage over terrestrial fiberfibre for in the last mile. This is because WiFiber™WiFiber® can be deployed in a day and costs substantially less to deploy than terrestrial fiber fibre. Not only does terrestrial fiberfibre take months to deploy, it also requires significant regulatory and environmental approvals prior to installation.

The opportunity

GigaBeam's vision is to enable communications capacity delivery faster and less costly than has been possible previously. With the addition of WiFiber™WiFiber® to a nation's information backbone to provide ultra- high- speed networks across cities,, , many customers will now have access to video/data/voice at prices once unimaginable.

GigaBeam WiFiber™WiFiber® is a true fiberfibre substitute for the entire last mile. It meets the need of service providers to increase network capacity while lowering access and maintenance costs. WiFiberOur® links are designed for the highest performance and availability and the lowest total cost of ownership. They improve network availability and resiliency to failure while reducing the costs of installation, network integration and maintenance.

With the fastest, most cost-effective means of bridging the gap between high-speed backbone networks and the business, home or desktop or home, communications service providers can offer consumers the same experience at home or in a satellite office that they would get in a high-spec office block with 'in--building'building fiber - fibre - removing the final bottlenecks in network performance where consumers want to deploy real-time, rich- media applications with reliable, very lowno- latency performance, wherever they happen to be.

As service providers wake up to the opportunity, this will have a highly disruptive impact on the telecoms industry, in the same way that Skype and mobile Skype is having today. While fiberfibre to the business and the home is prohibitively expensive, WiFiber™WiFiber® offers a low cost of entry into the business and residential telecoms market - an opportunity that's clearly too good to miss.

As consumer expectations are heightened by developments such as the ability for children and teens to watch their favourite sports replays on their iPhones, there really is no time to lose for telcos that want a slice of the action. Meanwhile, adults, wanting the maximum flexibility to flit between content at home, work and on the move, long for the day when all they need to carry with them is a PDA with a 40Mb hard drive on their belt, accessing all of their applications and data through thin client devices without cumbersome operating systems to complicate their activities. To complete this vision, consumers need consistently high-speed network access wherever they are, and wireless fiberfibre is the only viable solution today.

With industry leaders like Cisco reporting that '"video will drive a 21% compound annual growth rate in business IP traffic across WANsS from 2006 to 2011',,"
With industry visionaries like Cisco's John Chambers predicting that 30% of network content will be video-based within four years, can consumers really wait any longer for their service providers to catch up with them?