Dirty and cold in early February in a small British town during a pandemic blockade is not the best time and place to exercise, but for me it revived a forgotten memory and an interesting history of technology that promised much but delivered little. Walking through a housing estate in the early 1990s that stretched down the hill, I noticed several houses with strange antennas. Along with the usual UHF Yagis for television reception were small encapsulated microwave grids the size of a cookie cutter. Any unusual antenna arouses my interest, but in this case, although they are certainly unusual, I immediately understood what they are. What’s more, someone much younger than me really wanted one and just didn’t register because their service wasn’t available where I lived.
All promises …
Ionica is a product of the University of Cambridge’s corporate incubator, created in the early 1990s to be the first to provide an effective alternative to the monopolistic British telecom in the local chain. On the same subject : G7 suggest boosting IMF reserves to help vulnerable nations | WGN Radio 720. Which means that at the time in the UK, the only way to get a home phone line was to go through BT, as they had all the phone wires, and Ionica’s plan was to change all that by providing home phone services through microwave connections. .
Offering them will be cheaper than BT at the socket, as no cable infrastructure will be required and they will seek to beat the monopoly on call costs as well. For several years in the mid-1990s, they were the favorite of the British world for technology investment, with modern prestigious office building just outside of Cambridge and TV commercials to gain interest in their product. The service started in several British cities and then for almost overnight they found themselves in financial trouble and were gone. After their demise at the end of 1998, the service continued for a short time, but at the end of the decade it was over. What exactly happened?
The technology behind Ionica’s service could probably be replicated for a few dollars worth of WiFi modules in 2021, but at the time, it lay on the bloody edge of what was possible near the consumer end of the market. A tower with a base station was erected for each community to be served, and if the customer’s premises were at a directly visible distance from it, they could install this tin biscuit antenna.
The fixed line of sight operated at 3.5 GHz and used custom hardware made for Ionica by Nortel Networks. Rupture of a surviving unit from 2015 which we put under the break was posted on YouTube in 2015 and it reveals a phased set of antennas as well as RF and dashboards. The prevailing impression is that this would have been an extremely expensive device to manufacture in the mid-1990s, as many of its exotic RF features will now be integrated into newer silicon and possibly performed using SDR technology.
… But not quite the delivery
To be in a residential complex like the one where I saw the antenna in the winter of 1996, or so it would be, to see Ionica technicians doing on-site research and installations. At the time, there was a real demand for the service, as BT’s monopoly meant high line and call charges, and the promise of not one but two telephone jacks allowed the ability to use the telephone and the Internet side by side. On the same subject : Use these secret iPhone codes to see if someone is spying on your calls and texts. Heavy things a quarter of a century ago and I wanted them.
Maybe it’s just as good that I didn’t have a chance, because I would definitely lose money (This was not the only time I failed to see the inevitable in a decade!). Shortly after the noise about the availability of the service, there were stories about its cancellation during wet weather. We were confident that they were working on a solution, but even worse was ahead.
As spring turned into summer around 1997, some customers struggled to get any service at all, the fault was the green British greenery. Winter site surveys do not appear to have taken into account the summer leaves, which interfere with visibility to the base station, and this seasonal service only adds to the company’s troubles.
In the past, Ionica’s product was one way ahead of its time, but in others it was one whose time was almost up. Expensive hardware and limited base station range will now be addressed with much cheaper SDR chipsets and many more base stations, so deployment could be done much more easily and reliably during this decade. But the product itself now looks ridiculously dated, because who now needs a pair of analog phone lines? ADSL connections arrived in the UK around 2000, so very soon after the end of the company they would be left with a product that could not meet customer expectations. Is it possible that they used the same hardware to ensure a permanently turned on connection? Maybe, but it never appeared in their published plans and it is unlikely that there was enough bandwidth to compete with ADSL.
More than two decades have passed since Ionica’s death, and while the separation of cable TV and the local circuit to place ISPs in telephone exchanges has significantly changed the telecommunications landscape, for most people there remains a last mile connection owned by BT. Analog cable phones are now a legacy that the growing number of people have just because it comes with their broadband and even mobile calls are inexorably usurped by online services.
Maybe only now, with the arrival of 5G mobile phones, will we see that the remaining BT monopoly of the last mile has been broken. Meanwhile, apart from a few weathered antennas in the suburbs, little was left of the company; its base station hardware is appearing on eBay and is in demand by radio amateurs, and the prestigious A14 headquarters building in Cambridge is now home to several residents of the city’s wildly thriving technology park. The British spend much of their time fighting the rain, but this often knocks down a billion-pound company.
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