November 5, 2007
What about BOB (Business Only Broadband)?
Wireless provider expands from Chicago to Big Apple
telecommagazine.com
by Jim Barthold
Mon. November 5, 2007
Business Only Broadband (BOB), having found that there is still a market for a reliable point-to-point enterprise-class broadband wireless model, is taking its act to Broadway. Or, more specifically, Chicago’s largest wireless broadband provider, with a network of 29 transmission sites, is expanding its model into New York City.
“Wireless allows us to build networks of size and scope that we couldn’t build with copper, fiber or other infrastructure from a cost perspective,” said Richard Kingston, CEO of BOB. “We get more ubiquitous coverage in a market like Chicago or New York for a lot less money which allows us to ensure that our network is completely diverse … and I think that’s a real huge benefit that’s playing very big for us in the marketplace.”
Using wireless technology supplied by DragonWave and running in the commercial 11, 18 and 23 GHz spectrum bands, BOB has accumulated about 300 enterprise customers by delivering up to 300 Mbps of data throughput and generally “between 50 and 100 megs per customer,” he said.
While Kingston called the provider’s model “traditional in the deployment,” he said that it’s also “starting to see a unique and different trend in the way people are using our network.”
“One of the things that’s a driver for us is people are looking for diversity. They’re looking to ensure that their network has 100 percent uptime (and) using two different fiber providers there is not necessarily the right solution,” he said. “Our target customer is a large enterprise that requires diversity that might be the VLAN technology, VLAN capability to do metro Ethernet private network connections.”
To facilitate this, BOB is running fiber between Chicago and New York “to give people a private network connection from building-to-building from Chicago to New York,” he said.v
If things go well, and past experience being what it is, the service provider will expand to other markets, Kingston said.
“But we’re cautiously aggressive. We don’t want to make the same mistakes that were made in this industry 10 years ago; we want to go to more places and do more things but it’s going to be on the back of success,” Kingston said. “We want to ensure that we survive, that we’re not thrown into the cluster of people who were here and gone.”
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http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_3692