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January 20, 2005

The Enemy is the RBOC

By Nancy Gohring

Jeff Thompson, TowerStream’s founder, is right when he says that the competition to worry about is the RBOC: Thompson isn’t the only broadband wireless operator to make the distinction between competing against other potential wireless operators and the RBOCs. That distinction may get harder to make as time goes on and operators that use the unlicensed bands start interfering with each other. But that will be the time when it’s most important for the operators to band together. For a story I wrote for Wireless Week magazine, I talked to Graham Barnes, CEO of wireless ISP NextWeb, about a program he’s involved with that aims to help operators avoid interfering with each other. I quoted him in the story saying this: “The mindset I try to foster is that individual fixed wireless operators are not each other’s competition,” he says. “Our primary competition is the telcos, ILECs and CLECS. We have miniscule market shares compared to an SBC or local telco.” It would take a very very long time for a broadband wireless operator to build out a large enough network to seriously compete from a coverage perspective with the telcos. As such, the wireless operators would do well to essentially form a united front.

Posted by nancyg at January 20, 2005 3:51 PM

Categories: competitive landscape

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