Metro broadband wireless access provider Towerstream today said it has created a wireless T-1 with dual base station redundancy, allowing it to offer service level agreements equivalent to those offered by wireline carriers.

Towerstream is selling the service, called High-Availability T1+, in New York and plans to extend it to other metro markets in the next few months. The service basically establishes two wireless connections with different base stations positioned around the city. If one connection goes out or is interrupted, the customer has a full T-1 capacity back up to rely on. The base station networks are themselves wirelessly connected in a sonet ring configuration using fixed-wireless gear, adding redundancy to the backhaul network.

Towerstream officials said the carrier can leverage that redundancy to offer service level agreements of 99.999%, or 5 nines, a standard SLA in the industry equating to less than one minute of network downtime per month. One of the weaknesses often attributed to the broadband wireless industry is its lack of service level agreements since weather and crowding on unlicensed frequencies can hamper the network.