California PUC approves subsidy for fixed WISP build offering 14Mbs symmetric service

The California Public Utilities Commission announced July 9 that it approved a 40 percent subsidy totaling $2.8 million from its California Advanced Services Fund for fixed terrestrial wireless infrastructure to provide broadband connectivity to more than 14,000 unserved premises in Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties.

According to the CPUC resolution approving the project, it will be built over a 20-month period by Mother Lode Broadband and will leverage a regional network of existing mobile cellular towers reinforced with "expanded backhaul" -- most likely fiber.

The proposed throughput will blow existing WISPs -- both mobile 3G cellular as well as fixed premises providers -- clean out of the water. It's on a business class scale providing symmetric connectivity of "up to" 14 Mbs. There's no word on latency and Mother Lode Broadband is mum on what protocol -- WiMAX is a likely possibility -- that it plans to use. In addition, the CPUC resolution is silent on the technology that will make service this scale possible, only revealing it will employ "high capacity licensed spectrum."

Only time will tell if this is for real or simply more wireless vaporware. With the deployment planned over 20 months, there is a relatively large amount of that -- and probably too much for those 14,000 premises that needed broadband 10 years ago and are still stuck on dialup or sucking a satellite. "I'll believe the speeds when I see them," one skeptical Northern California industry insider tells me.