WiMax Operator's Manual

CHAPTER 6 ■ BEYOND ACCESS 143
storage networking products are achieving increasing acceptance). I know of no wireless
broadband equipment that provides for native support for any storage networking protocol.
In the past, service providers that offered storage services tended to define the offerings in
one of two ways. They would offer a complete outsourced storage service where data backup in
remote data centers would be provided, as well as the download and retrieval of stored data
over a high-speed network, or they would simply provide a transport for an enterprise to transfer
data to a storage site of its own choosing. Companies offering complete storage solutions
have not fared well in the marketplace, and today storage transport appears to be the better
service offering.
Storage transport normally requires a separate storage switch, though some multiservice
platforms can handle storage protocols as well as IP and/or Ethernet. Enterprise-class storage
requires quite a bit of bandwidth and thus would be best attempted over millimeter microwave
or aggregated unlicensed spectrum in the 5GHz region. I suggest that any operator contemplating
offering storage services first poll customers and prospective customers to determine
the likely take rate of such a service before buying equipment to support storage applications.
To date, storage networking has not been a big business from the carrier perspective, though
that could change.
Web Hosting and the Central Office
Web hosting is a service generally provided by specialized ISPs, not by local broadband access
providers. I know of no instance of a broadband wireless network providing this service,
though it is certainly feasible. Web hosting requires what is known as a server farm, which is
just what the name implies—a data center holding numbers of servers supporting numbers of
Web sites and Web-based broadcasts, multicasts, unicasts, and transactions. Often, though
not always, the Web hosting company will form a relationship with a specialized provider of
transport such as NaviSite, which will ensure the expeditious delivery of hosted content.
Web hosting is a complicated business that is really separate from the high-speed Internet
business. As with broadcast video, it demands a fundamentally different kind of physical plant
(although the two could be combined, albeit at considerable expense). Web hosting is best left
to specialists.
The MMDS broadband wireless services began as networks dedicated to delivery of video,
and some local networks still function in this manner. A few have even been successful, primarily
in remote areas where a well-established cable incumbent is absent, although today with
the ready availability of direct satellite broadcast services almost everywhere it is doubtful how
long the traditional wireless cable model will remain viable.
Also, Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Services (MMDS) convergent services networks
have been set up on the cable television model where a couple of 6MHz channels have
been allocated to residential high-speed access while the rest of the spectrum has been
assigned to television channels (though I know of no outstanding successes based on this
approach). Given the relatively limited amount of bandwidth available in the MMDS bands,
the model seems somewhat dubious, though it could work with digital television equipment
where several channels apiece are assigned to the 6MHz frequency slots. The problem is that
most such networks have been built on the macrocell model and cannot reuse the data channels,
and therefore no considerable population of data users could be served.