The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

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What does Google have up its sleeve? Taken together with other Google wireless and broadband initiatives, this network could be a piece of a larger plan to build a future heterogeneous network, or HetNet, that combines both cellular and Wi-Fi technologies into a single extremely flexible and high-bandwidth system. HetNets will become the mobile carriers’ future network architectures, but there’s nothing precluding Google from deploying one, as well, using all of the Wi-Fi, small cell and unlicensed spectrum at its disposal.

Google’s small cell experiment

Though Google made portions of the application confidential so they’re not viewable by the public, Crowley was able to glean some interesting details from the document, which he then posted in his blog.

A Ruckus Wireless Wi-Fi hotspot/small cell

Essentially, Google wants to build and operate over two years a very dense network of 50 low-power small cells in both indoor and outdoor locations. The total breadth of the network would only be two miles so this would be quite a high-capacity concentration of cells indeed. It would use the same 2.5 GHz spectrum currently used by Clearwire for WiMAX and its forthcoming LTE network, but Google did not reveal the specific radio technology it would use, nor did it reveal the manufacturer of its base stations.

This isn’t Google’s first request to the FCC for to test a new wireless technology. Last February Google filed an application with the FCC to experiment with a new residential gateway that used advanced Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies to redistribute Google Fiber’s high-bandwidth connection. My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote that Google could be eyeing longer-range gigabit-Wi-Fi as a means of blanketing towns and cities with untethered broadband.

In addition, Google is a big cheerleader for the unlicensed TV white spaces, which would expand the free-to-access model of Wi-Fi to the wider mobile network. It’s also a backer of the FCC’s proposal to designate 3.5 GHz a shared band over which any company could deploy small high-capacity cells. Google wants to test its new small network over licensed frequencies, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t shift over to the shared small cell band when it becomes available.

Google Mobile?

Despite all of the rumors about Google teaming up with Dish Network or T-Mobile, I have serious doubts Google wants to become a full-fledged license-owning mobile operator. But the more details emerge about the Google’s wireless experiments, the more I suspect that Google plans to get into the mobile business – or at least the mobile broadband business – in a very non-traditional way.

Instead of building towers, buying nationwide 4G licenses, and offering voice and SMS plans, Google could build tightly integrated, multi-technology, small cell mobile data networks around the country. Starting with Google Fiber cities, it could use its install base of residential and business connections to deploy a shared gigabit Wi-Fi network that any other Google Fiber customer could access (similar to the residential hotspot approach Free Mobile uses in France).

Second, Google could build a network of indoor and outdoor LTE small cells, either tapping into the new shared 3.5 GHz band or by leasing airwaves from a company like Clearwire, and those cells could be backhauled again with Google Fiber links. In rural or less densely populated areas it could extend its networks range by using white spaces. All of those parts wouldn’t exist as separate networks. HetNet would glue them all together, allowing customers to seamless move between Wi-Fi connections and cellular links and in many cases access both radio technologies simultaneously.

“The most recent Google application might be part of a larger plan leading to HetNet architectures in which, say, licensed and unlicensed wireless networks would be combined,” Crowley said when I asked him about the possibility. “Backhaul for such networks is technology agnostic but Google Fiber could be made to handle it.” Crowley, however, was quick to point out that there is nothing in Google’s numerous FCC applications that indicate it has HetNet plans in the works.

If Google were to take the HetNet approach to mobile broadband, it would have to ask itself a key question. Would it want to focus solely on dense urban zones – where most mobile data user congregate – or would it want to fill in all the gaps in between? If it’s the latter case, then Google would have to start playing the mobile operator’s game. You simply can’t provide 4G coverage on a freeway using small cells and Wi-Fi.

Google wouldn’t necessarily have to buy another operator or build its own big-tower macro network from scratch though. It could become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) leasing capacity off of a T-Mobile or a Sprint’s network in areas where its HetNet couldn’t reach. As I’ve written before, the carriers are now much more open to the idea of selling network capacity to potential competitors. But then again, the carriers have never dealt with an MVNO that would be as powerful and threatening as Google.

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NSN revealed its plans to become a lean, mean 4G machine last November, when it announced a restructuring plan involving 17,000 job cuts and the shedding of any business unit unrelated to its core mobile broadband strategy. It quickly sold off its wireline access business to Adtran and its mobile backhaul unit to DragonWave. NSN’s carrier business support systems (BSS) software division is also rumored to be on the auction block with both Ericsson and Amdocs as potential bidders.

NSN, however, chose to hold onto its optical business, saying it fit with its 4G goals, but it now appears to have changed its mind. Here’s Ovum network infrastructure analyst Dana Cooperson’s take:

“When Nokia Siemens Networks announced its updated strategy about a year ago it said it was focusing its business on mobile broadband but needed to keep its optical group as a complement. This struck Ovum as odd: its strongest position in optical (it’s ranked 10th globally in the $14.9B market with just under $500M annual sales) is in the network core, where there is little connection with MBB. Furthermore, NSN’s optical business has been slipping for years with no clear plan to improve; it has not done the kind of fundamental R&D that its main competitors (e.g., Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Huawei Technologies) are doing.”

It’s unclear what a private equity firm will do with a global optical equipment unit, but Cooperson said Marlin’s goal may just be to flip the business over to one of NSN’s competitors, possibly Juniper Networks.

NSN 4G focus, however, appears to paying dividends. At the time of its restructuring announcement, NSN had just acquired Motorola’s commercial networks businesses, it was running short of operating cash, and it had missed out on some of the initial major LTE contracts. But in the last year it has emerged as a big 4G contender, winning key carrier deals in Asia and posting record profits in the third quarter.

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Operators are deploying more of these small cells as they try to keep up with the high demand for mobile data in small and crowded spaces like in offices or shopping malls. Small cells help repurpose crowded airwaves, but still need a way to offload those signals back to the core network via some form of backhaul.
Building backhaul to a large cell tower is easy because there’s plenty of real estate for the equipment, but building backhaul to small cells in places like stadiums is tougher because there may not be close access to a wireline network.

DesignArt’s chips manage to offer wireless backhaul for those small cells and are designed to be deployed in groups. Qualcomm’s clearly interested in this space, having invested in ip.access a maker of small cells.

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O2 is using these 100 hotspot deployments as the infrastructure groundwork for a future small-cell network. Like Wi-Fi, small cells will deliver surgical capacity in high-trafficked areas, but unlike Wi-Fi, those cells will use O2’s licensed spectrum, providing a big boost of mobile broadband capacity exactly where its macro network is most congested. According to O2 Wi-Fi managing director Gavin Franks, the carrier is targeting the end of the year for the small-cell rollout.

“What we have deployed so far isn’t a full-fledged small cell network,” Franks said. “We have deployed a future-proof network that allows us to easily get to small cells. And obviously it’s our intention to do so.”

It might seem easy to task Wi-Fi nodes for double duty as small cells, but Franks said O2 had to plan its deployment carefully for the hybrid configuration. The dual radios will require more backhaul capacity than the DSL connections that usually power Wi-Fi can provide, so O2 has either run fiber or installed microwave radio links to hotspot clusters, which are then meshed together via Wi-Fi backhaul. Franks said O2’s mobile network planners determined the placement of each node beneath the macro network to ensure there would be no interference when the small cells went live. Finally O2 ordered up specialty outdoor Wi-Fi equipment from Ruckus Wireless that can easily support the installation of micro-cellular base stations in the future.

When the time comes, Franks said, O2 technicians will simply pop the chassis of the Ruckus access point, insert the 3G radio, and instantly have a live small cell. Ruckus makes its own 3G and LTE small-cell modules, but that doesn’t necessarily mean O2 will buy them. Ruckus has also partnered with Nokia Siemens Networks to provide an integrated Wi-Fi-cellular small platform, and NSN also happens to be one of O2’s primary network suppliers.

Of course, 100 small cells isn’t exactly an ambitious network. To get to a true heterogeneous network, or hetnet, O2 would need to layer thousands if not tens of thousands throughout London, providing a dense layer of high-capacity nodes under the macro network’s coverage umbrella.

But Franks said O2 is only in the first phase of its plans. This small-scale rollout will test the efficacy of small cells as well as its free Wi-Fi model. If they prove useful, O2 will look to expand the network throughout the U.K. as well as coordinate with its parent company, Telefonica, on international launches. But as of now, Franks said, O2 doesn’t envision creating small-cell networks on a grand scale. O2 is taking a more practical approach initially, using Wi-Fi and small cells to target high-demand areas rather than planning a ubiquitous network of tiny nodes.

Still, there is a lot of potential here for O2 to go big if it wants to. Unlike other carriers deploying Wi-Fi, O2 doesn’t plan to integrate hotspots with its mobile network or sell capacity to outside customers. “We don’t see any value in charging for Wi-Fi,” Franks said. “People just aren’t willing to pay for it.” Instead it wants to make its money through value-added services, such as selling multimedia or offering digital-wallet capabilities. If that model works, it could find itself putting up Wi-Fi all over the U.K. — and small cells would come along for the ride.

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We tend to associate femtocells with spot coverage: Having trouble getting a signal inside your house? Well, call up your carrier and chances are it will offer you a femtocell, delivering a private signal in your home. But RascomStar is taking that same concept and extending to entire villages and towns in the Congo. This summer, it’s deploying a pilot network of 50 miniature base stations — supplied by U.K. femto vendor ip.access — in communities all over the Congo. RascomStar plans to expand the pilot into a larger-scale commercial launch in 2013, as well as extend it to at least 10 other African countries.

RascomStar’s satellite network plays a critical role here. Mobile communications may use the airwaves to deliver their voice and data payloads, but they rely on wireline networks to take over once those transmissions hit the tower. Since telecom infrastructure is scarce and far between in remote communities, RascomStar is contracting with ViaSat to backhaul those femtos, bouncing their transmissions off orbital satellites back to the RascomStar’s core network in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo.

Operators all over the world use satellite to backhaul tower sites in remote locales, but the combination of femtocells with satellite adds a new twist. Femtocells and picocells are designed to (BE?) self-configuring devices that can be installed much like you would INSTALL a consumer Wi-Fi access point.

If RascomStar takes this trial to its logical conclusion, it could have a big liberating effect on network deployment. Rather than send engineers, technicians and trucks to individual communities to build towers and install costly base stations, a carrier could practically build remote networks via mail, shipping femtos out to isolated communities where someone with a basic technical knowledge could get a wireless network up in running in a matter of hours.

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LTE and HSPA+ require fat backhaul pipes. Operators have managed to handle those demands by laying fiber to their towers, but that option won’t be available in a hetnet world. Those small cells will be mounted on street poles, building walls and every manner of urban fixture where access to fiber isn’t ready available and the cost of laying it is prohibitive.

But there’s an emerging group of wireless radio vendors such as Siklu, BridgeWave, and, soon, E-band Communications that think millimeter wave technologies will provide both the reach and capacity at the right prices to backhaul the hetnet. E-Band this week said it raised new funding – though it didn’t reveal how much and from whom – to develop millimeter wave small mesh radios.

Millimeter waves technically encompass a huge swath of spectrum from 30 to 300 GHz, but for wireless backhaul purposes, regulators have designated three big blocks of licensed spectrum in the 70-95 GHz range for point-to-point high-bandwidth radio links. According to E-Band co-founder and CEO Sam Smookler those frequencies are ideal for small cell backhaul for two reasons:

• It’s relatively easy to get licenses for big blocks of millimeter wave spectrum, which would allow carriers to deploy large backhaul pipes over 1 Gbps in size. While a single small cell may not need that much capacity, the complexity of hetnets will require daisy-chaining many small cells together, each cell passing its load down the line. The final backhaul link in such a mesh or chain winds up handling dozens of cells worth of traffic before it can dump it onto a fiber network, Smookler said.
• Small cell backhaul makes the best use of millimeter waves’ high frequency characteristics. The higher the frequency the shorter distance a wave propagates unless it gets a serious power boost. But the hetnet by definition will be composed of densely packed cells in urban environments, meaning no millimeter wave will have to travel far between hops, Smookler said.

Plenty of alternatives

E-Band and other millimeter vendors aren’t the only ones trying to solve this small cell backhaul problem. Microwave is the traditional powerhouse of wireless backhaul technologies, using its longer range, lower frequency links to connect far flung towers back to the network proper. Microwave equipment vendors like Ericsson, NEC, Aviat Networks, DragonWave, and Ceregon Networks are retooling their long-haul radio designs for small cell deployments.

The lightRadio Cube, Alcatel-Lucent's vision for the small cell.

Like the millimeter folks, the microwave vendors are focusing on higher frequencies, where spectrum is plentiful enough to support ultra-fat links. The problem is those 60 GHz airwaves are all unlicensed, meaning no single operator will have proprietary use of them in any given area. That means there is the potential for interference between radios in areas where multiple carriers are running multiple hetnets of small cells.

Interference is also the knock on probably the hottest technology in small cells today: Wi-Fi. Metro Wi-Fi equipment makers Ruckus Wireless and BelAir Networks – just acquired by Ericsson – are not only building small cells that pair Wi-Fi and LTE together as access technologies, they’re also using Wi-Fi mesh architectures to backhaul those cells.

The big advantage of such an approach is its cheap: the 802.11n gear may be souped-up for carrier networks, but it’s certainly not the highly specialized equipment used in microwave systems. The problem is that everyone and their dogs, cats and hamsters are using the unlicensed airwaves of Wi-Fi. Operators will need to fight interference not just from one another, but home and business wireless networks.

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Ofcom also suggests that it will evaluate using more spectrum for such a purpose with unused FM radio bands. This report comes on the heels of a successful test of white spaces broadband in Cambridge earlier this summer. This might be a footnote for broadband nerds except for the fact that the UK appears much closer to white spaces than the U.S. where the effort originated. Despite the U.S. having approved rules related to offering service in white spaces a year ago, we’re still waiting for devices, services and details about deployments.

In the U.S., where the FCC has taken to calling the service Super Wi-Fi, a combination of rules designed to keep those trying to use the spectrum for broadband from interfering with those trying to use the spectrum for TV or wireless microphones have made the deployment of services and building devices a time-consuming challenge. A year after the rules were approved there are just a few test networks, no commercial devices and nine companies that have volunteered to operate databases that will help keep white spaces signals from interfering with nearby broadcasts.

In an interview with Peter Stanforth, CTO at Spectrum Bridge (see disclosure), one of the licensed database providers for white spaces in the U.S., I was assured that despite the relative quiet, work was still progressing on actual deployments. For example, Stanforth said some radios that will work with the databases are going through the FCC certification process and he expects the FCC to approve something before the end of the year. “It’s a struggle because no one has ever done this before,” he said.

However, commercial radios won’t be out until the end of next year, which means real, commercial devices won’t be out until mid-2013 if we’re being really optimistic. To complicate things further the FCC and Congress are considering ways to take back some of the airwaves currently used by digital TV broadcasters and allocating some of that for licensed, cellular service. Doing that, theoretically could reduce the airwaves available for white spaces. While the nation waits for white spaces, which first became available as a result of the digital TV transition that occurred in 2009, the stated use for those airwaves have changed.

Instead of being a utopian vision of mobile broadband, which Google and others portrayed it as back in 2008, it has morphed more into a utilitarian way to provide broadband to rural areas at a lower cost than laying fiber. So goodbye to white spaces as the future home for an economical Internet of things and hello to it as a WISP of sorts for rural America. In the UK it’s still discussed as potential backhaul, but perhaps that vision will also change.

Disclosure: Spectrum Bridge is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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To do that, Allied Fiber is building a new kind of fiber network that combines not just network materials, but also data centers, to bring connectivity at competitive places over more and more of the country. Within the next three weeks, Allied Fiber will order its fiber cable, and six months later, the network will begin taking traffic. The premise is radical in that founder Hunter Newby has envisioned a way to bring terabyte connections across a certain swath of America by building out a new type of infrastructure, and leasing it out to other providers.

Here are the details:

• It will connect New York City, Chicago and Ashburn, Va. and cost $140 million to build the first phase.
• There will be 19 data centers spaced every 60 miles along the fiber pipe.
• The eventual network will cover more than 11,000 miles across the country.
• The long portion contains 528-fiber cable with a 216-fiber short-haul cable.
• Allied Fiber will interconnect its long-haul assets with partners such as Sidera Networks, which offers metro fiber networks.

Newby helped build out Telex, which changed the way the original web companies connected to the old-school copper access network. Now he’s trying to change connections again. Not only is his network going to bring competition; it’s also going to be custom-built for early customers. Newby told me last May that construction would begin by the end of 2010, but he said customers have moved more slowly than he anticipated.

Because Allied Fiber is building out custom networks for the first few customers, getting the details right and approvals in place took time. However, until everything is done, Newby declined to name the customers.

Those customers that got in early dictated some of the design elements, such as the type of backup power in the data centers and exactly how many threads of fiber they would need. For their early buy-in to the project, they get cheaper rates as well as what amounts to a custom network, kind of like being able to add your personal finishes to a new home in a planned community as it’s being built out.

The network will still have room for newcomers to lease the dark fiber then use their own equipment in the data centers to light it up. Allied Fiber isn’t a carrier. It only wants to serve carriers by providing the physical infrastructure, which means it’s really out to bring infrastructure to areas that will compete with networks currently owned by companies such as Verizon Communications, Level 3 and others. Instead of contracting with Verizon for getting fiber backhaul closer to its cellular towers, for example, a mobile operator such as Sprint could work with Allied Fiber, or even an Allied Fiber customer.

Given that we’ve written about the coming terabit age and the bandwidth-intensive nature of providing backhaul access for wireless networks as well as capacity to support cloud computing, Allied’s Model is pretty exciting. Newby says, “We have enough in committed contracts that will generate revenue that exceeds what we need in our financial models. This thing is building momentum, and if you read anything in the news you know the need for fiber for not going away it’s only increasing.”

Newby hopes that by bringing the infrastructure for fiber networks to more places it will help lower the costs for rural and regional Internet service providers (wired or wireless) to provide cheaper and better services to their customers. He compares what wholesale providers charge for access — about 50 cents per megabit — to the up to $300 per megabit some rural carriers have to pay to get circuits that will eventually bring their traffic out to a large backhaul provider and sees an opportunity.

And because the benefits of interconnection are still more than the benefits of building out a network to cover the entire country for each operator, Newby is confident that he will entice most of the large players, including the big fish such as Verizon or AT&T to see the advantage of connecting into Allied Fiber’s data center and network. After all, it will lower their costs for interconnection even as it makes the environment more competitive.

This should help keep carriers honest, or at least the national broadband market more competitive, Newby suggests. “This idea isn’t new and radical and it’s completely and totally necessary. To date there is no one that is responsible for the physical fiber and colo infrastructure for the country.” Maybe Allied Fiber is about to do what the Federal Communication Commission can’t seem to figure out: help make American broadband just a bit more competitive.

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