Allegany County Deploys Countywide Wireless Broadband

Maryland's Allegany County recently announced that it has expanded its wireless broadband network to begin serving the majority of residences and businesses.

The existing network, AllCoNet 1, connects public and nonprofit offices, including civic offices, libraries, schools and public safety agencies in the county. The expansion phase, now under construction and known as AllCoNet 2, is planned to deliver broadband availability to 85 percent of county residences, 95 percent of businesses and 100 percent of industrial parks, covering more than 550 square miles.

"Not unlike the shift from telco phone lines to PBXs in the '80s and '90s, today forward-thinking enterprise and quasi-enterprises such as municipal governments are leading a new trend in telecom," said Lindsay Schroth, broadband access technologies analyst with Yankee Group. "Allegheny County is one of a growing number of municipalities that have realized substantial cost savings and service improvements by installing their own telecom network using broadband wireless access. The AllCoNet 2 deployment in Allegheny County now represents one of the most extensive municipal wireless broadband networks in the country, and perhaps in the world, and one that serves as a model for other municipalities and enterprises."

Allegany County concluded that its economic future depends heavily on the ability to offer business and residential users carrier-class broadband services. Unsatisfied by the spotty and slow pace of private carrier broadband deployments and facing the prospect of investing millions of dollars to deploy fiber, the county sought alternative solutions.

Spearheaded by county networking supervisor Jeff Blank, civic leaders formed AllCoNet as a self-operated municipal carrier to deploy wireless broadband solutions using both 6 GHz licensed frequency bands for a point-to-point ring around the network as well as unlicensed frequency bands for point-to-multipoint to offer reliable, cost-effective broadband connections. Once completed, the county will grant local ISPs wholesale access to the network to provide services to the county's residences and businesses.

"Even if the local exchange carrier had decided to lay enough fiber for complete, countywide coverage, the $189 million price tag was well beyond our means," said Blank. "While fiber would have provided more capacity, with the Alvarion solution we were able to deploy the same carrier grade of access services as we could with fiber, but at a fraction of the cost. Since we act as our own carrier, there are no local fees to pay, so our ISP partners will enjoy access to the network at wholesale prices. Leveraging Alvarion's state-of-the-art technologies, which form their BreezeACCESS Complete Spectrum solution, we've achieved near complete coverage of our rural and mountainous county --something we would have waited years to get with fiber even if we had had the financial resources to deploy it."