Dave Thayne, founder and president of Heritage Internet Services Inc. of
Bluffdale, Utah, near Salt Lake City, is building what promises to be the
biggest Wi-Fi Internet access network in the country, a series of massive
hotzones that will cover all the significant population centers in the five
states he’s targeting.
Did we mention this was big? The question is, can he bring it off?
The company has been building its network for a little over a year and
offering service since the start of 2004. It claims to already be the biggest
wireless ISP in Utah and Idaho in terms of subscribers signed and access points
deployed.
“We’re just coming out of the chute now,” Thayne says. “We’ve been quietly
growing without too much fanfare. We didn’t want very many people to know what
we were doing. Now it’s time to come out of the closet.”
One reason for coming out of the closet is that the company would like to
bring in some additional financing to help underwrite the enormous capital costs
involved — ultimately over $200 million to cover the five states, Thayne says.
“We don’t need a lot of funding but it would be nice to have a little
extra,” he says.
The company does already have some outside money, but Thayne says that much
of the initial capitalization came from the sale of marketing territories to
entrepreneurs who are selling the Heritage service directly to end customers and
keeping “the lion’s share” of the revenues.
If this doesn’t all quite add up, it may just be that Thayne isn’t telling us
everything. One senses he is not by nature a communicative person, and as much
as he says it’s time to come out of the closet, he’s certainly not prepared to
take his clothes off in public.
“I’d rather not go in to too much detail [on the role and function of the
dealer/investors],” Thayne says. “It’s the whole crunch of our business really
and I don’t want our competitors to know what we’re doing.” This gets to be a
fairly constant refrain.
Thayne will say that the company is now shifting focus from selling small
territories to small entrepreneurs to selling larger territories to larger
investors.
The technology strategy sounds simple, perhaps too simple. Heritage is
blanketing population centers with Wi-Fi 11a or 11g coverage by placing access
points in a grid — about one every mile — using a combination of leased cellular
tower space and assorted other rights of way.
The company is using the higher-bandwidth Wi-Fi standards because it intends
to offer telephony and video-on-demand services over the network — and not in the
long term either. Thayne says Heritage will begin offering telephony service
within a couple of weeks, video within 60 days.
“We’re building [the telephony service] right now,” he says. “It should be
out in two weeks. We’ve got it in beta test and it looks really good. It’s
probably ready to go, but we’ll give it another week or so.”
Heritage is using mostly Cisco infrastructure equipment, in some cases
modified in unspecified ways. The company also did custom integration of
customer network access devices and antennas. “We are using some tricks, but I
can’t tell you them all or I’d have to kill you,” Thayne says laconically.
Although customers initially need outside antennas to connect, when the
network build-out is complete, they will be able to get by using indoor antennas
only.
They will also be able to get a connection anywhere within the coverage area.
They could use their service at home, at at an office and in public areas in
between such as parks and even on the road.
By colocating with telcos, Heritage has built its own managed backbone The territory-wide backbone network allows Heritage to centralize So far it has about 20 to 25 percent of Salt Lake City and surrounding towns In Idaho, Heritage is up and running in Boise, Meridian, and points east, and Thayne naturally won’t say how many customers have signed up so far, but will They pay $199 for the first month of service, hardware, and For now, customers get “a T-1 connection to their home basically.” But when The service, Thayne says, is for anybody and everybody. “It doesn’t matter if There are other WISPs in Utah and the other markets he’s entering, he “They’re all really small companies. There are only a couple of any size at The only real competition, he says, is communications giant Comcast Corp., The blanket coverage and Thayne dismisses this notion. His wireless network will be one of the most When we ask about the robustness of a wide area network based on Wi-Fi Interviewing David Thayne generates almost as many questions as answers. Also, how many dead spots are there likely to be in a Wi-Fi network with Time will tell if Heritage and Thayne are for real. If they are, if they have The big one is, will enough customers be willing to buy service from a “A lot of people are tired of the telcos and being stuck with them,” he says. Manifest destiny? We’ll wait and see. Reprinted from ISP Planet.
network, which Thayne says reduced the cost of DS3s
what other WISPs pay when they simply buy capacity on telco-managed networks.
authentication to its main network operations center
can use the service wherever Heritage has coverage.
and cities covered, and will complete its rollout within the next three months,
covering population centers in Utah comprising 1,006 square miles. Cost: $16
million.
continues to expand. Within three to four months, the company expects to launch
in the other three states with partial coverage.
say that the growth in customer acquisition is running at about 15 percent per
month, month over month.
installation — though Thayne says customers could eventually do their own
installations. They pay $39.95 a month after that.
the backbone network is complete and all customers are on 11a or 11g customer premises equipment
it’s business or home. If they bought it at home, they could use it at work.
They can basically use it for any application anywhere.”
concedes, but none are a serious threat.
all. They don’t have any backbone network — they’re just buying circuits from
anybody — and they’re mostly using MAC address
authentication.”
and it can’t match the performance of the Heritage network or provide the kind
of portability Heritage offers. But will it work?
portability benefits are similar to what service providers implementing NextNet
Wireless Inc.’s 3G-based wireless technology are touting. Those service
providers, however, are using licensed spectrum and insist that licensed
spectrum is essential to ensure reliability and security.
secure anywhere, he claims. Heritage puts an SSL
user device. It is using the TTLS (Tunneled
Transport Layer Security) EAP-type for encryption, and also 128-bit WEP.
compared to what NextNet’s technology can provide, Thayne will only say, “We’re
pretty solid all through, we’ve got our own backbone. Our technology is good.”
We’re still not clear on how you come up with $200 million in capital to
complete such a large project simply by selling license rights to a largely
unbuilt network and raising “a little” capital on the money markets.
access points placed at intervals of a mile in urban areas? How many homes and
businesses in the supposed coverage area will actually be able to get a
connection without mounting a roof antenna?
or can get the money and actually build the network, there remain a bunch of
other questions.
start-up using such radical technology and business strategies for Heritage to
recoup its investment? Thayne clearly thinks they will. He’s appealing to a
particular kind of customer.
“That’s what our network is all about, about being independent, about being a
little bit pulled away from the mainstream, and being able to create your own
destiny in terms of telecom.”
