JAB Wireless is the latest entry into the Western Slope Internet services arena. The following information is from the Colorado Secretary of State's Business website and Google. JAB is a private company that initially received about $15 million in venture funding to provide point to multipoint wireless based Internet services. The company was started in 2006 and is headquartered in the Denver area. Operations are based along the front range as well as the Western Slope. In January of this year (2009) they received an additional $15 million in venture funding and are now expanding into the Texas area south of Dallas/ Ft. Worth. Update 2-27-09 - A new wireless company known as Stelera Wireless is looking for places to put antennas in the county. You can view recent testimony before the House Commerce Committee at this location. I'm fairly certain that Stelera Wireless will be offering phone service just as Skybeam does today.

In this area, smaller wireless operations such as Kaycee.net and Paonia.com were initially merged with Sopris Surfers. In just a few months, however, the new name "Skybeam" began to replace the Sopris Surfers name. In this same time frame, billing was moved from Carbondale to Berthoud north of Denver. Skybeam/Sopris, to the best of my knowledge, is standardized on the Motorola Canopy product line. Of late, Skybeam is now marketing phone service bundled with their Internet offering. This puts them in direct competition with legacy common carrier operations such as Qwest and TDS. For me personally, Skybeam connect speeds are currently over twice as fast as anything I can obtain from TDS the local telephone company. I'm hoping against hope this does not change. The main Skybeam website can be found here.

I am a subscriber to Skybeam and have found the technical details on their website to be a little thin to say the least. Basically, the output of the Canopy radio is standard Cat 5E wired Ethernet in a POE configuration. Connection to their system is authenticated and verified by the use of a "User Name" in the form of First.Last and a valid password. Additionally, their system looks for the router or PC MAC (physical) address. All of this is normally automatically supplied by the router or PC. A change out of a router of PC, however, can cause problems unless the MAC address of record is cloned via the new device (router or PC) to match the original install. Lacking this, a manual and direct logon is required in order to establish and cache a new MAC address of record. All of this is fairly easy to do once what is needed is understood. If you use their services, be careful to note and record the User Name, Password and MAC address used in the initial install.

If you will remember from many years ago, the standard for stereo hifi systems was 20 - 20,000 Hz flat frequency response. A standard phone line achieves a fairly flat response from 300-3000 Hz which matches the characteristics of the human voice. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) still does a very good job of transporting voice but does it in a way that is much different and much more efficient than a standard phone line. See Pulse Code Modulation - PCM to view what is used in current legacy telephone systems today. The upside to this technology is that transmission costs are very low and many times this results in flat rate, all you can eat pricing. Included in the downside of the technology is the characteristic that VOIP is not compatible with high speed analog data modems. Analog modem technology was built around the technical characteristics of PCM transport. PCM in the telephony world is rapidly dying to be replaced by the much more efficient packet transport technologies. This means you need to be careful about using items such as FAX machines, security systems, Dish and Direct TV systems that require a telephone line connection. All of these items employ some type of analog data modem that may or may not work with VOIP. The same is true of cell service or any service using switched voice packet technologies.

Rather than use the term "How Reliable", it's probably more accurate to review how various communication devices are powered and how the data is transported. Relative to all communications devices and systems, I would recommend an excellent article written by Curtis Ashton who is a system power engineer for Qwest. The comments in blue are mine to make the article easier to read and understand. Near the bottom of the article, note what is said regarding use of cordless phones when used with current land based phone service. I'm sure that the Skybeam equipment has some degree of backup power but probably not to the extent that cell sites and central offices have. Does any of this matter in this location? See the next paragraph that details the transport issues.

The primary means of transport for most services is the use of buried or aerial metallic cable or fiber. In rural areas, some form of wireless technology is often used to get around the cost of installing and maintaining cable facilities. Wireless radio towers are known to susceptible to weather related damage or being hit by something or just falling down due to lack of maintenance. On the cable side, vehicles routinely hit pole structures or roadside cable boxes. There are also many backhoes in this area and they routinely and accidentally dig up all manner of buried items. TDS would like you to think their service is ultra reliable and secure but as this article demonstrates such is not the case. The same is true of Qwest which has lost fiber service to the entire region on two occasions that I know of. Cell sites some times lease circuits through local phone companies to connect their towers. This, of course, makes them vulnerable to any failure in the local land based phone system. It would be nice to know the power and transport details of each service but I know of no source for such information. If local newspaper articles are correct regarding the recent TDS fiber cut, it's obvious that local emergency officials don't have such information available either. An exception to all of the above might be the use of space based communications in some form.

Please continue to next page - - TDS <--> Satellite --

• Skybeam Main Site
• JAB Financing
• Canopy Data Sheet
• Sopris Surfers
• Whispertel
• General Power Issues
• TDS Reliability?
• CTIA
• Customer Code