Dimitrios Sidiropoulos founded E-ZY.net a few years back in Veria, Greece: he also runs the wireless equipment distributor Aerial.net. E-ZY.net has been manufacturing equipment mostly for wireless ISPs in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—until Sidiropolous opened a U.S. manufacturing and distribution arm for the company earlier this year in Draper, Utah, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City.
“What we’re trying to do is to bring a high performance product to the market at a really reasonable price,” says Scott Parsons, who was previously the founder and CEO of Pacific Wireless and is now E-ZY.net’s chief operating officer. “So the last couple of years have been spent perfecting the software and the reliability of the product.”
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The difference, Parsons says, lies in performance. “Our products are a little bit higher performance at about the same price—we have higher gain antennas, and so you get a longer range,” he says. An expanding product line The EZ-Go, a low-cost, lower-gain AP, will be released this summer, and the EZ-Bridge will be released at NXTcomm. “It’s a plug-and-play bridge solution for connecting a couple of buildings together…. everything comes in the kit to do a point-to-point link,” Parsons says. “There’s a 25-meter CAT5 cable, and power supplies, and the antennas with the radios and wall mount brackets. So you can plug them in, you can point them at each other and power them up, and you’ve got a working link up to four miles at 15 Mbps.” Although the entire product line is currently limited to 802.11b/g, Parsons says 802.11a and 900 MHz products are planned for later this year, with 802.11n and WiMax to follow soon after. “And hopefully next year we’ll find a good performing 802.11n MIMO type system, and we’ll come out with a product that has a very high throughput, like 60 Mbps,” he says. Regardless, Parsons says, the entire product line is heavily focused on performance. “We’ve done some things in the software to make the data handling in the devices more efficient, so we’ve gotten a higher throughput than is traditionally available in an 802.11g type product,” he says. “We’ve streamlined the software to reduce overhead, which gives us a higher throughput performance.” Competing with build-it-yourself Still, Parsons says the true competition for E-ZY.net is the build-it-yourself solution. “A lot of the smaller guys have been building products themselves: they buy a RooTenna from Pacific Wireless, and they buy a radio from somebody else—they buy all the bits and pieces, and they put it together,” he says. “We’re able to give them an option at a price point that they don’t need to even think about doing that any more.” The need to keep the price as low as possible, Parsons says, was what initially motivated the company to open its new manufacturing facility in Utah. “Shipping the products over from Greece would be just too expensive,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to offer them at the price point where we think we need to be.” And looking ahead, Parson says, E-ZY.net’s product line will just keep growing. “We’re going to expand our products into USB and Ethernet extenders—wireless extenders, like Aerocomm makes but longer distance,” he says. “We’re working on the software for that right now—and so those are going to be some of the new products we’ll be releasing later this year.” Article courtesy of ISP-Planet.  News Around the Web InternetNews is a source of industry news and intelligence for IT professionals from all branches of the technology world. InternetNews focuses on helping professionals grow their knowledge base and authority in their field with the top news and trends in Software, IT Management, Networking & Communications, and Small Business. AdvertisersAdvertise with TechnologyAdvice on InternetNews and our other IT-focused platforms. MenuOur BrandsProperty of TechnologyAdvice. |
