Weston Vivian another engineering consultant who advises prospective carriers and who tracks industry trends, cites a report from Swedish Telecom, indicating unqualified technical success for its own trial system. Vivian also confirms that the Guatemala City system has demonstrated its reliability in high-speed data applications. While one must be cautious in extrapolating from a handful of systems using varying modulation techniques and network management systems, many basic attributes of LMDS networks would appear to favor the new technology, including high-speed, low cost and ease of deployment. At least on the surface, LMDS looks highly competitive. Mathias has studied LMDS's prospects extensively.
Few observers disagree.
Related multipoint services at 38 GHz and 24 GHz are not quite so richly endowed, but they still enjoy hundreds of megahertz of spectrum and, of course, permit frequency reuse. In fact, so abundant is bandwidth in the millimeter microwave regions occupied by the multipoint services that spectral efficiency isn't even an issue at this time. Significantly, no one is advocating microcells, advanced modulation techniques, or adaptive antennas, as is the case in the cellular and PCS bands, although such tactics could be used in the future. Environmental issues LMDS and other microwave broadband providers must cope with numerous environmental contingencies in propagating their very shortwave signals through the urban landscape. These services operate at frequencies where tree leaves are sufficient to block a signal, but, arguably, the uncertainties facing them are fewer than is the case for telephone companies or CATV carriers.