Fixed wireless future takes shape

Out in the area west of Washington Dulles International Airport, a rapidly growing community of technology companies is trying to build on the already burgeoning technology corridor a few miles to the east. One feature of this still rural part of Virginia is that it contains more horses than people; another is that a fast connection to the Internet is expensive (if available at all). T1 lines from Verizon can cost thousands of dollars per month, and this makes things harder than they need to be for these new companies.

Enter a new kind of provider — fixed wireless. The new technology companies west of Dulles are now able to tap into Internet connections with bandwidths up to five megabits per second through Roadstar Internet , an aggressive startup with solid technology. According to CEO Martin Dougherty, fixed wireless avoids the costs of T1, the latency of satellite connections, and has more bandwidth than either.

But are you ready to send your corporate information over a radio link to the Internet? After all, the signal, even though it’s using a tightly-focused beam between Roadstar and the customer site, can still be tapped. Because of this possibility, Dougherty says that Roadstar’s connections to high-speed corporate users are encrypted using a proprietary algorithm. In addition, the signal is frequency agile, meaning that it is constantly changing.

The end result is that even if you had a receiver that could handle the 5.8GHz frequency linking Roadstar with its business customers, you probably still couldn’t find the actual data stream for a long enough period of time to do anything useful. If you did manage to solve the frequency-hopping algorithm, you’d continue to have the problem of the encryption.

And, of course, if you’re still worried about security, Roadstar supports pretty much any kind of VPN, so you can add your encrypted tunnel to their encrypted, frequency-agile signal. The company also adds some additional security measures, which I won’t go into here but really appear to help ensure that communications will be nearly impossible to compromise.

Of course, Roadstar is not by any means the only fixed wireless ISP with a an eye on business, and the company is not the only one to take security seriously. What Roadstar does demonstrate is that it’s not only possible for a small ISP to provide high-quality security, it’s to be expected.

It also demonstrates that fixed wireless has a real future. Roadstar may be located in rural Virginia, but it’s providing a level of bandwidth greater than what most companies can buy from the phone company — and at less cost. Plenty of companies that could go with older technologies will doubtlessly start moving to fixed wireless just so they can go faster for less money. The fact that it’s at least as secure as a wired solution makes this choice more than just possible — it may now be worth switching for.