Policies, technology trends coming together to benefit enterprise connectivity

Government policies and new products appear to be coming together to create a strong future when it comes to broadband for the enterprise.

The obvious policy initiative is the National Broadband Plan the FCC unveiled yesterday, which aims to bring ubiquitous broadband to Americans. The implication on the enterprise is the FCC's desire to ensure that residential customers can get access to an average of 4 Mbps speeds and that anchor institutions such as schools, libraries and hospitals, can get 1Gbps speeds. This initial broadband action plan also incorporates Julius Genachowski's "100 Squared Initiative" to deliver 100 Mbps to 100 million homes in 10 years. A newly modified goal will set an asymmetric speed of 100 Mbps/50 Mbps.

As FierceCIO editor Caron Carlson points out in her editor's corner, any company that has facilities in rural areas (or even semi-rural areas), wants to move to these areas or makes use of telecommuting will have greater options for connectivity. This could provide a number of advantages for reducing the IT budget, she said.

Of course, this plan is a 10-year plan. But interestingly enough, many municipalities across the country are deploying or planning to deploy their city-wide broadband services in a bid to spur economic development and improve city operations. For instance, Lafayette, La., may now have the most sophisticated broadband market in the country now that the city has deployed a fiber network, offering a 10Mbps symmetrical connection for $30 per month and a 50 Mbps symmetrical connection for $58 per month--some of the cheapest rates in the nation. The cable incumbent there has now decided to upgrade its network in response to the competition.

Andrew Cohill, president of Design Nine Networks, a firm that helps municipalities plan broadband networks, says one of the more successful models for municipalities is what he refers to as the open services model. Under this arrangement, municipalities or a group of local governments, build out a network and then sell capacity to any operator that wants to connect. This model drives competition. It also has implications for enterprise IT, as it attracts niche providers such as those specializing in medical and telehealth applications, medical diagnostics and specialized video conferencing, Cohill said.

For example, Wired Road in southwest Virginia was formed after local governments in the Twin Counties region created a regional broadband authority to build an integrated fiber and wireless network to offer to service providers. Cohill reports that after 18 months in operation, five service providers have signed on and the cost of Internet access has decreased by 50 percent in less than a year.

Meanwhile, it appears that the enterprise femtocell market is heating up. These in-building mini base stations are designed to provide in-building connectivity--saving enterprises money and increasing productivity. Moreover, femtocells can bridge telecommuters and disparate office buildings.

Today, Airwalk Communications announced an on-premise enterprise femtocell combining both wireless voice and data functionality via a dual-mode CDMA 1x and 1xEV-DO platform. Alcatel-Lucent last month introduced an enterprise femtocell offering that includes 3G and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) radio access and self organizing network features to enable plug-and-play connectivity and avoid interference with the macro network, as well as other femtocells.  

Simon Saunders, chair of the Femto Forum, says to expect service providers to begin marketing enterprise femtocells this year as they want to play deeper in the enterprise market. I'm going to delve more into that topic in upcoming issues of FierceMobileIT.

Of course, we cannot ignore the move by the FCC to call for freeing up 500 MHz of new spectrum for mobile broadband in the next 10 years, of which 300 MHz should be made available in the next five years. That certainly has implications on an enterprise industry that is gravitating toward a full deployment of mobile productivity tools. With IP-based high-speed wireless networks coming into commercial service, there should be some very compelling high-bandwidth enterprise applications. - Lynnette