A telecom startup unveiled on Wednesday a plan to use
wireless technology to provide speedy broadband Internet service to 90
percent of Mainers by 2017.
Redzone Wireless, a Camden-based Internet service
provider, has already begun offering wireless residential and commercial
broadband service in its first three coverage areas: Portland,
Waterville and Great Diamond Island.
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| Scott Smith, tower installation foreman at Tilson, climbs a tower used by Redzone Wireless in Portland. Redzone Wireless hopes to provide speedy broadband service to most of Maine by 2017, the company announced Wednesday. Courtesy of Tilson |
It is doing so using 4G LTE technology, which to date has been used primarily for cellphones.
“Today is a new day and the start of something great,”
said Jim McKenna, Redzone’s president, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in
Portland’s One City Center.
While most people think fiber-optic cables connecting
every home and business in Maine is the best route to high-speed
Internet service, McKenna said he must “respectfully disagree.”
He cited estimates that it would cost $3 billion to extend
fiber optics to all of Maine, which would be “prohibitively expensive.”
Wireless technology like that which the company is deploying costs 90
percent less than laying down fiber to every home, McKenna said.
The company is now “aggressively working” to expand its
network to 15 communities by the end of this year and reach more than 25
percent of Maine’s population. Within 24 months, McKenna said Redzone’s
network will be able to reach more than 90 percent of Maine’s
residents.
Redzone plans to leverage the 4G LTE technology to deliver
wireless high-speed Internet service around the state by installing its
equipment on existing cell towers.
Gov. Paul LePage and University of Maine System Chancellor
James Page were both on hand at the Wednesday event to emphasize the
importance of high-speed Internet service to Maine’s future prosperity.
“I’m really proud to see 4G LTE being developed in Maine,”
LePage said. “It’s a cutting-edge technology. It’s truly a game changer
for Mainers.”
Both men spoke of the importance of broadband to advance
learning and commerce, and the impact that would have on elevating Maine
from the bottom of national economic indicators. Maine has ranked close
to the bottom on lists of broadband speeds by state, including a report
based on Ookla NetMetrics data that said Maine ranks 49th out of the 50
states and a recent report from Akamai Technologies that puts Maine at
48th among U.S. states and far behind countries like Estonia and Macao.
LePage said that needs to end, and innovative companies like Redzone are the keys to making that happen.
“I look at it this way. Maine is on a three-legged stool.
It’s pretty stable – sit on it [and] it won’t go forward, it won’t go
backwards; it doesn’t move,” LePage said. “But Maine has to get off that
stool and get on a two-wheeled bike so we can pedal into the future and
much more prosperity.”
While hundreds of cellphones and other mobile devices use
4G LTE technology through the cellular networks, Redzone is the first
company in the country to use 4G LTE to offer residential and commercial
broadband service, according to Michael Forcillo, Redzone’s vice
president of sales and marketing.
The ceremony was held in One City Center, a major office
building on Portland’s Monument Square. Redzone beams its wireless
Internet service to customers within the Portland area from the roof of
that building.
How many customers? The company isn’t saying how many it’s
signed up so far, but Forcillo said he’s not worried about finding an
eager audience among locals looking for a competitive option.
“We don’t anticipate any difficulty in finding customers
in Portland who are interested in an Internet-only solution that doesn’t
involve a landline or cable TV subscription to get it,” Forcillo said.
“We’ve had an excellent response to our initial pilot and commercial
effort. Customer acquisition is not a great worry for us.”
Josh Broder lives on Munjoy Hill and was part of Redzone’s
pilot program. He’s also CEO of Tilson Technology, the Portland-based
telecommunications infrastructure contractor that Redzone hired to help
it install equipment and deploy its technology.
Broder said he was skeptical at first about the
technology’s ability to offer fast and reliable Internet service, but
he’s been pleasantly surprised.
“Now that I’ve used it I’d say it’s as good as cable … and the upload speed is faster,” he said.
Broder backed up Forcillo’s claim that Redzone is leading
the country in deploying this technology in this way. Sprint had a pilot
program in Texas, but that hasn’t been deployed on a commercial scale,
Broder said.
Redzone is offering a rate of $39 a month for basic
Internet service, which doesn’t require bundling of other services like
cable or telephone. The company said download speeds will vary depending
on tower locations and other variables, but the 4G LTE advanced
technology has been shown to deliver download speeds of up to 100
megabits per second, far exceeding the state’s 10-megabit-per-second
definition of high-speed broadband.
NEW OPTIONS FOR CONNECTIVITY
Redzone’s plan to bring high-speed Internet service to 90
percent of Mainers by the end of 2017 raises the question of whether the
tens of millions of dollars invested in fiber networks, like the
state-backed Three-Ring Binder project, were a waste.
Broder offers an unequivocal “no.” The fiber-optic network and Redzone’s wireless network work together.
The state has an existing spine of fiber-optic data
connections. Redzone uses wireless technology to provide high-speed
Internet to homes and businesses for the last mile of transit – the
distance between a fiber-optic spine and the end user. As soon as a
person’s data reaches the nearby tower or rooftop where Redzone’s
technology is located, those bits and bytes travel over existing fiber
networks, including the Three-Ring Binder.
The state of Maine is backing Redzone’s ambitious mission.
The company qualified for incentives under the state’s Pine Tree
Development Zone program, and in March it received commercial loan
insurance from the Finance Authority of Maine on a $4 million loan it
secured last week from Camden National Bank. The company plans to use
the loan to purchase equipment and fund ongoing operations while it
scales up. The loan insurance, provided through FAME’s commercial loan
insurance program, means the quasi-state agency will be liable for
paying back 90 percent of the loan if Redzone fails.
Redzone is using bandwidth it secured earlier this year from the University of Maine System.
The system owns the rights to use the Educational
Broadband Service Spectrum to promote educational media distribution
throughout the system network of campuses, but about five years ago it
transferred most of that traffic to its wireline infrastructure,
according to Michael Cyr, the university system’s director of
architecture and service management in the IT department.
Cyr said the university system is initially leasing the
use of the spectrum to Redzone for $214,000 a year, though that amount
will increase as the company scales up over the 30 years of the lease.
Source : pressherald
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