Metro wireless ISP providing direct Gigabit link to 50-story office block in New York

Towerstream is taking a page from Cogent Communications’ book, announcing today that it is providing a gigabit broadband capacity to the General Motors building in midtown Manhattan, marking the first time it has provided service to an entire building rather than an individual business.

Towerstream previously has provided point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links to customers in its eight-city metro footprint, but in the case of the GM tower, Towerstream is using the rooftop as a point-of-presence (PoP) in its six-node wireless ring circling New York. As a node on that ring, the GM building is hooked directly into its multi-Gb/s transport network, allowing it to extend that capacity to the entire 50-story, one-square-block office building, much the same way Cogent brings a Gigabit Ethernet to a building through a direct fiber connection, said Jeff Thompson, CEO of Towerstream.

“We’re starting to do a lot of the same things as Cogent, but we can do it all with wireless,” Thompson said. “In fact, we feel we have an even better cost structure than Cogent.”

Towerstream has typically worked on the much smaller scale providing T-1 replacement and backup services to small and medium businesses with Alvarion and Aperto Networks point-to-multipoint and supplying large businesses with fiber T-3 and higher connections using point-to-point wireless links supplied by DragonWave and Ceragon Networks. Turning up an entire multi-tenant building though hadn’t been an option until now because of the high-cost of the high-power radios required to deliver that much capacity, Thompson said. But in the last year, radio prices have gone down while radio capacity has gone up, Thompson said, allowing Towerstream to pack more bits into a single hertz at a lower cost. One of its two suppliers for the GM project, DragonWave, recently released a radio with 1.6 Gb/s radio, while the other BridgeWave Communications product mainstay is a 1 Gb/s radio.

Towerstream plans to replicate the multi-tenant approach in NYC as well as in its other markets: Boston, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Providence, R.I. “We’ll do a couple of buildings per quarter,” he said. “We think it will work even better in other markets. There’s demand in New York, but New York is still the most wired market in the U.S.”

The wireless ISP, however, isn’t giving up on its point-to-multipoint strategy, Thompson added. In fact, Towerstream is expanding its broadband wireless strategy, shifting away from proprietary equipment and launching mobile WiMAX over unlicensed spectrum using Alvarion gear. Unlike Sprint and Clearwire, Towerstream is using mobile WiMAX in a fixed wireless configuration, but Thompson said it will still benefit from the economies of scale the standard is expected to bring.