Cable operators now have a new weapon in their arsenal for addressing business customers. Motorola on April 6 announced a version of its Motorola MOTOwi4 Canopy wireless broadband solution specifically aimed at the cable industry.

Cable Canopy uses Motorola’s widely deployed broadband wireless technology to allow cable companies to quickly deploy last-mile access to commercial customers from their existing hybrid-fiber coax networks, said Jeff Walker, senior director of marketing at Motorola. While those HFC networks pass about 50% of businesses, providing the final connection into a business can be a costly process, and has significantly slowed cable companies in their efforts to expand business revenues, he said.

“To make that last mile connection may involve digging up parking lots, or trenching cable, which can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition,” Walker said. “This allows them to make that last-mile connection from the cable plant to strip mall or office building to tie them into the network.”

Cable Canopy features the new Motorola SB5000, a DOCSIS 2.0-compatible cable modem which has been hardened for the outside plant and can be strand-mounted onto cable plant, deriving both RF transmission and power from the network. Attached to that is the Canopy module, providing the wireless transmission to a second Canopy customer module.

“The drop that comes out of Canopy device is coming out Ethernet, and it can be point to point or multipoint to reach businesses,” Walker said. “The key thing is that this becomes an extremely cost-effective way to deliver these services.”

Rather than encounter the up-front costs of providing a wireline connection before selling a service, a cable company can sell the service, then quickly install the Canopy gear, only incurring the capital expense once the revenue is assured.

Motorola now offers three options for cable companies to attract business customers – through the HFC plant, through direct fiber connections via Motorola’s Quantum Bridge acquisition and now through a broadband wireless connection.

“A cable company can connect a business customer via broadband wireless and, as business grows, make the decision to move to a wired connection for greater bandwidth,” Walker said.

Motorola will demonstrate Cable Canopy at next week’s National Cable & Telecommunications Association show in Atlanta.