Cibola Wireless
Albuquerque, New Mexico
CASE STUDY #2
A real world speed test of a MVDDS network showing a download speed of 66.72 Mbps. The upload speed here is 13.22 Mbps.
This is cable modem class performance.
Cibola Wireless
RSAccess provides broadband Internet access services to customers in New Mexico through Cibola LLC (“Cibola Wireless”), which acts as a contract service provider. Cibola Wireless is a large-scale service offering that reaches approximately 900,000 consumers, or almost 50 percent of all households in the Albuquerque geographic license area. Cibola Wireless delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and up to 10 Mbps upload to residences and businesses throughout the Albuquerque metro area
MVDDS across the valley
We cover Albuquerque
From the Sandia Park transmission site, Cibola Wireless can deliver MVDDS service to a home or business up to 20 miles away at 50/10 Mbps speeds. This coverage reaches 900,000 people in the Albuquerque metropolitan area, or roughly half of the geographic license area’s total population.
Among Cibola Wireless’ many residential and commercial customers is J&D Foods, which is the third largest wholesale manufacturer of beef jerky in the state of New Mexico. J&D Foods relies exclusively on Cibola for broadband connectivity to support two computer terminals, two credit card processing machines, and 14 employees that use Wi-Fi across a 1,500 square foot warehouse. The wireless connection runs from the antenna at the top of the J&D Foods warehouse building to the Sandia Mountains, with the return connection running over an unlicensed link.
J&D Foods has said it finds Cibola Wireless’ service to be a cost-effective substitute for larger fixed wireline services in the area without any tradeoffs in network quality.
Cibola Wireless’ actual MVDDS service area extends more than 20 miles from the transmitting site at Sandia Park, NM, covering most of the Albuquerque valley.
Having provided service for over eight years in a geographic area that covers 50 percent of homes in the Albuquerque geographic license area, RSAccess and its partners have more than shown the viability of MVDDS. RSAccess, however, continues to explore additional opportunities to expand its presence in this market as part of its growth strategy.
Method
MVDDS, technically, is a one-way service; therefore two small unobtrusive antennas must be mounted on the roof or eve of a customer’s location. One antenna receives a signal while the other transmits a signal back to the base station. The MVDDS downstream signal delivers encapsulated IP data to customer equipment. The RF upstream signal brings back to the main tower the encapsulated IP data from the customer equipment. A single Ethernet cable provides upstream Internet connectivity from the roof-mounted customer premises equipment built into one of the antennas. The downstream service is delivered via RG6 coaxial cable. Both cables connect to MDS America’s proprietary customer premises equipment, which has an Ethernet handoff to the customer’s network.
The DVB-S2 Internet Radio Server is at the main transmitting site and NOC. The server consists of a number of components that carry out various functions ranging from IP encryption to authentication. It is a turnkey system, and no extra equipment is needed to provide high-speed Internet access. At the subscriber end, an MVDDS modem is used with the Ethernet router, which plays an important role separating downstream and upstream traffic between MVDDS and uplink spectrum. End-user equipment will typically have multiple interfaces: a MVDDS antenna interface, an Ethernet interface, and an interface for the upstream transmission. The equipment receives an IP address (dynamic or static) from the NOC. This upstream connection can be achieved using many different methods to include WiMAX, Wi-Fi, WLL, and PSTN, among others.