Mark Lyn­der­say

Qui­et­ly, dur­ing the Car­ni­val sea­son, TSTT launched their WiMax ser­vice for broad­band af­ter weeks of test­ing. WiMax (World­wide In­teropa­bil­i­ty for Mo­bile Ac­cess,) is tra­di­tion­al­ly used as a "last mile" so­lu­tion, re­plac­ing hun­dreds of in­di­vid­ual drops to cus­tomers with a trans­mit­ter and re­ceiv­er sys­tem that's sim­i­lar in prin­ci­ple to WiFi. The ser­vice, ac­cord­ing to Jef­frey Chung, will of­fer speeds of up to 10Mbs and is po­si­tioned as a de­liv­ery op­tion for cus­tomers who are not cur­rent­ly served by a Blink Broad­band wired con­nec­tion. You can't buy WiMax from TSTT. You can buy Blink Broad­band and if there is poor in­fra­struc­ture in your area, TSTT will, at its dis­cre­tion, of­fer you the WiMax op­tion for con­nect­ing to its ser­vice.

The ser­vice, on in­tro­duc­tion will sup­port speeds up to 2Mbps, but the 802.16e spec­i­fi­ca­tion for WiMax is the­o­ret­i­cal­ly ca­pa­ble of sup­port­ing up to 144Mbps. It's al­so a great so­lu­tion for en­ter­prise cus­tomers who need a tem­po­rary so­lu­tion, and TSTT proved that pud­ding by sup­ply­ing broad­band to Chogm us­ing WiMax tech­nol­o­gy. But the cur­rent state of af­fairs falls far short of the ad­ven­tur­ous use of the tech­nol­o­gy that Jay Alvi, the com­pa­ny's VP for En­ter­prise Ser­vices, ad­ver­tised at a No­vem­ber press con­fer­ence. Alvi promised a Jan­u­ary launch of the ser­vice sup­port­ing fixed and "no­madic" use of WiMax, with full mo­bil­i­ty op­tions to come lat­er in 2010.

That op­tion will be added to the Blink-on-the-Go ser­vice, pos­si­bly as a high­er band­width, pre­mi­um ad­di­tion to the ex­ist­ing EV­DO based ser­vice. "Our first pref­er­ence for cus­tomers is our wired in­fra­struc­ture," said Jef­frey Chung. "There's less la­ten­cy and an over­all bet­ter con­nec­tion with a wired con­nec­tion." There's no deny­ing the at­trac­tive­ness of the WiMax op­tion, though. In test­ing, the ser­vice worked large­ly as ad­ver­tised, though I ex­pe­ri­enced some hic­cups. I live at the west­ern end of St James, an area served un­til quite re­cent­ly through a Lightspan de­vice that neutered Blink. If you ever want to see a TSTT broad­band ex­ec­u­tive blanch, just say "Lightspan," prefer­ably in a low hiss­ing whis­per.

You take the de­vice out of the box, plug it in and con­nect to it via WiFi. The WiMax sig­nal was mar­gin­al in my area, and the box had to be lo­cat­ed close to an east­ern wall. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the bet­ter the WiMax con­nec­tion, the weak­er the WiFi sig­nal be­came where I was us­ing my com­put­er. Even­tu­al­ly, I found a spot that bal­anced the two sig­nals. Dur­ing two months of use, the sys­tem per­formed re­li­ably, de­liv­er­ing the promised 2.5Mbps that was the for­mal test sig­nal speed. In the first month, the Echo­life mo­dem proved prone to los­ing the sig­nal en­tire­ly and re­quired a deep re­boot (one that wipes any cus­tomi­sa­tion you have done via the web in­ter­face.) I nev­er could fig­ure out how to pass­word pro­tect the WiFi sig­nal from the mo­dem's router, but no­body would be close enough to pil­fer the sig­nal any­way.

Ac­cord­ing to Chung, TSTT should be ready to be­gin of­fer­ing WiMax as a mo­bil­i­ty so­lu­tion by April, us­ing USB modems that will take ad­van­tage of the com­pa­ny's planned growth in cov­er­age as it adds trans­mit­ters through­out the coun­try. TSTT seems to be miss­ing a fair­ly ob­vi­ous boat here by mov­ing the op­tion to choose a WiMax con­nec­tion from a cus­tomer choice to a cor­po­rate patch job. Yes, the com­pa­ny should use WiMax to even out its cov­er­age and even take ad­van­tage of TSTT's pro­vi­sions to fi­nance de­liv­ery of ser­vice to un­der­served ar­eas, but a cus­tomer should be able to choose WiMax as their de­liv­ery op­tion, whether they need to con­nect at their deputy's house or set­up a LAN par­ty.