October 28, 2002

Front Range Tech Biz - WisperTel making some noise in rural markets

By Todd Neff

It feels like a dining room in a nice house in Evergreen, an impression strengthened by the long, wooden table and the view: Through picture windows, there were conifers, yellowing aspen, neighboring rooftops and a lot of blue sky.

But to Barry Pier, Michael Brinks and Eric Tomaszewski, this dining room is a network operations center (NOC), squeezed into the same laptop computer Pier was using for a PowerPoint presentation about Wisper Telecommunications (WisperTel) projecting on the wall.

If the years following the Telecommunications Act of 1996 were a land grab by competitive wireline carriers, the telecom bust has engendered a grab for air. Unlicensed radio spectrum, in WisperTel's case the 2.4-gigahertz band, is the hot commodity now.

Through this medium, companies such as WisperTel, Englewood's Usurf, Evergreen's Purple Mountain Internet and cooperatives such as Boulder-area Magnolia Road Internet Cooperative are providing high-speed Internet access at a sliver of the infrastructure cost of wireline alternatives such as cable or DSL.

In WisperTel's case, Pier did grab air: His equipment is homesteading in the heart of the 2.4-ghz band in his 1,000-mile service area. "If competitors install, they'll be broadcasting interference," he said.

The stakes in this wireless broadband market are limited. Carriers such as Qwest and AT&T Broadband have big advantages in the densely populated urban and suburban areas they serve, and the costs of their broadband services are falling.

But companies such as WisperTel (www.wispertel.com) have much to gain in their niches. These tend to be either ignored pockets inside metro areas - southern Denver being an example - or the metro fringe that debt-laden cable and telecom carriers currently aren't building out.

WisperTel focuses on wealthy bedroom communities such as Evergreen, Genesee, Conifer and Ken Caryl. Its network backbone consists of towers on three mountains (Lookout, Squaw and Mount Morrison). On those towers, Solectec antennae pass data back and forth between mountaintops and to ISP InterPlanetary Web Services (IPWS) in Wheat Ridge, where the network goes wireline through an OC-12 (622 mbps) connection.

IPWS is a three-person ISP with 200 Internet access customers and 200 hosting customers, and owns a 50 percent stake in WisperTel, according to Joshua Rogers, IPWS executive vice president.

A second set of antennae are Solectec fixed point-to-multipoint devices that can beam data line-of-sight at about eight megabits per second within a 15-mile range. For residential service (it also serves businesses), WisperTel designates a "neighborhood gateway" home upon which the company mounts a 12-inch-by-12-inch "pizza box" antenna to receive signals from a mountaintop.

This connects to a milk crate-sized box mounted outside the house, then back to a second Nokia antenna that serves up to 40 homes within a 1.5-mile radius. After equipment costs of $800 and a $125 installation fee, 256-kbps service costs $49.95 a month ($74.95 for 512-kbps service).

Where WisperTel most differs from other rural wireless plays is in the Nokia RoofTop wireless routers that pass data among themselves in a mesh topology. As a result, subscribers in the valleys of Evergreen don't need line-of-sight with either the neighborhood gateway or the mountaintop. The Nokia antennae, like the Samsung equipment, operate in the 2.4-gigahertz spectrum and have a top speed of eight mbps.

WisperTel won't roll out a neighborhood gateway until at least 20 homes are signed on, which gives WisperTel a roughly 11-month payback on service. "We call it a reverse field-of-dreams strategy," Pier said. "Come and we will build it."

Marketing has been grassroots. Pier and Brinks pitch homeowners- associations. Funding won't change that approach. "The highest-reach medium we need is the community newspaper," Pier said.

Pier, a wireless industry veteran, came up with the idea after his most recent employer, New York-based wireless software provider Vaultus, shut down its Denver operations last year. There, he met Tomaszewski, now WisperTel's senior manager of network operations. Brinks was working as a telecom consultant when he began assisting Pier on the WisperTel business plan. He is director of sales and marketing.

Pier launched beta service in February, serving himself and neighbor Randy Watler, a software engineer for Westminster's Finali Corp. WisperTel now has 24 customers and a waiting list of about 400. Its service area includes 4,000 homes. Watler said the service has been reliable. "If I had any money to invest, I'd invest in them."

Though the NOC is on a laptop, antennas and other hardware cost money. This self-funded venture is hoping an angel investor or two share Watler's sentiments. Pier seeks $750,000 to $1 million for WisperTel, which the company will use to subsidize customers up-front equipment costs and speed network deployment.

Ryan Nieman, national director for mobile solutions, said that though WisperTel's shaky financial footing might be a concern for potential users, the idea is promising. "I think they have the opportunity to make good money where telecom, wireless, and satellite broadband service providers don't have an opportunity of making an ROI," he said.