September 21, 2007

Bresnan Trials Wi-FI

By Jim Barthold

Billings, Mont. is a nice place to live, a good-sized city with a small-town feel. Heck, you can even play golf on a nice day in January. Of course, Billings is not one of the much-ballyhooed NFL Cities so it has every chance of being on the wrong side of the digital divide.

In reality the community nestled an arrow’s shot from where General George Armstrong Custer met his fate at the Little Big Horn is, indeed, on a knife’s edge of technology innovation, including building a Wi-Fi network that backhauls wireless traffic into a DOCSIS cable system.

“We want to try to bring technology to Montana that’s available in all of the world-class cities in the United States,” said Sean O’Donnell, regional vice president of operations-Montana, at Bresnan Communications. “We’ve spent four, almost five years now working on that mission.”

Bresnan already delivers a triple play offering that has about 27,500 basic digital subscribers, 16,000 high-speed Internet customers and “pretty darned close to 10,000 telephone customers” among the city’s population of just over 100,000 souls. The MSO has run well over 100 miles of fiber to the point where it’s taking coax only three amplifiers deep to 600-home nodes.

All of those things are nice and put Billings on the right side of the digital divide. What pushes the town over is the Wi-Fi trial that Bresnan’s now running with equipment from Fujitsu Network Communications and BelAir Networks. 

Less mesh, more modem 

“I wouldn’t say we’re groundbreaking, but we are using all DOCSIS backhaul instead of more conventional (Wi-Fi) mesh networks like you would see in a number of other municipalities,” said O’Donnell. “Our design is a little bit unique technically.”

Compared to some other Wi-Fi rollouts, very few of which include cable operators, the design and the trial are unique. The wireless network uses Wi-Fi radios and the cable physical plant instead of having one Wi-Fi device communicate wirelessly to another device in a mesh. Bresnan places DOCSIS 2.0 cable modems in the network to grab the traffic and run it back to the system headend and then off to the public Internet.

“We let anybody that is a residential or commercial high speed Internet customer of ours use their existing e-mail address and password to authenticate and log onto the network,” said O’Donnell. “We do have a charge by the day or by the hour capability (but) we really haven’t seen any activity to speak of on that because it’s very much a technology trial first and foremost.” 

Just a trial

Unlike other Wi-Fi activity where the cities are either involved or requiring it, Bresnan has done this on its own with its own money and business case “to see if it’s something we’d be interested in doing more broadly,” he said. “We had some preliminary discussions with the city about some different service activities (but) I don’t think it’s far enough along to really talk about.”

Bresnan also looked at WiMAX, which is really technologically suited for an outdoor environment like Billings where the city sits in the shadow of a huge cliff, but “we weren’t convinced that WiMAX was quite ready to go yet,” said O’Donnell. “the layout of the city of Billings is a little unique in that there are some different elevations and different heights.”

Besides, he emphasized, nothing’s set in stone.

“This is just a technology trial. We wanted to see if we could make it work before jumping into a larger WiMAX-type service. Let’s take a look and see what we can do with a smaller, more controlled Wi-Fi network,” he said.