Ensemble Communications is, as its initial investor and now CEO Bill Stensrud explains, “one of the wireless companies that went through the bubble and came out the other side.” That survival-of-the-fittest ethos now appears to be paying off, with San Diego getting the first commercial taste in the United States of Ensemble’s technology: super-fast wireless broadband for the commercial market.

With a transmitter atop One America Plaza, XO Communications last month rolled out service for the Downtown market that can reach buildings as far as five kilometers away at speeds of 20 megabits per second. How fast is that? Unless a business is in one of the 5 percent to 10 percent of buildings wired for true fiber, traditional copper wire limits speeds to 1.5 megabits, perhaps twice that for a customer who ties two lines. Ensemble’s technology can crank up to 100 megabits.

Responsibility for rolling out the service here lies with Ken MacDonald, g.m. of XO in San Diego. By the last week of August his sales team had signed up 10 customers. Pricing runs from about $600 a month for a 1-megabit package with speed bursts up to 5 megabits to $2,000 for a 20-megabit network. Because orders do not individually require a connection to the phone company grid, they can be up and running within five days of an order. An 18-inch dish that can serve six accounts is placed on the building’s roof and fiber run to a CD-player sized device that is placed in the customer’s or building’s telco closet. The service for now is Internet only; in the future XO likely will offer a bundle that combines phone and Net.

This flavor of broadband wireless is not the same as WiFi, which allows broadcasts over very short distances on the free public portion of the wireless spectrum. Also, while cell phones run at a relatively low 800 megahertz, which allows the signal to penetrate walls, the XO spectrum is at the 28 gigahertz level, which means line of sight is required for a connection today, although work-arounds are coming.

Pouring rain also can slow the speed, although Stensrud notes that in Hong Kong, where an Ensemble network serves 400 buildings, two monsoons have failed to knock it out. “If you design and you assume it will never rain, it will never work when it rains,” he says.

Mark Salter, the Reston, Va.-based v.p. of broadband wireless for XO, has been in Southern California overseeing the rollout. (Irvine followed San Diego last month.)

While Salter praises San Diego for its wireless IQ, he also has a practical reason for rolling out the service here: “Whenever you kick something off, you want your hardware and engineers nearby.” Indeed, not only are Ensemble and its 60 employees here, but so is Varian, the Poway firm that manufactures the hardware.

Most businesses are doing fine these days on the T-1 bandwidth they can squeeze out of copper. But Stensrud says the quest for speed is unquenchable. “The first law of networking is that networks always grow,” he says. “I remember that once you dialed up for a connection and you were happy, he says. “When you got your cable modem, you weren’t happy with dial up anymore. So, we can put the technology in where you can get 1 megabit today. But if you are a telecom carrier, you want to put infrastructure into your network that is not going to be obsolete in 12 months.”

— Tim McClain