The Foundation of Your ISP

Foundation Technologies aims to address the ongoing concerns of small, rural ISPs. The company performs outsourced IT management, tech support, and fixed wireless Internet consulting for its ISP customers, many of whom fear "losing the tech guy" to big city salaries.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 11, 2003]

Based in Cary and Asheville in North Carolina, Foundation Technologies has been working with ISPs since 1997. The company started out as an outsourced IT solution for ISPs.

Daryl Burgess, who with Boatner Howell founded the company as a limited liability corporation, says that when rural companies look for IT staff, they have difficult decisions to make. "Often they end up hiring a kid out of college, but after a year or two the guy learns enough to go to a big city at $80,000 or $90,000 per year."

When that happens, he wants ISPs to know that Foundation Technologies can step in and do the management instead. "For example, we're talking to a guy who owns an ISP with less than 2,000 customers that's run by the tech guy, but the tech guy's getting divorced and the owner is worried about the tech guy moving."

Since it was founded, the company has focused on serving dialup ISPs, but Foundation is increasingly working on fixed wireless broadband subscribers. "Many ISPs want to offer broadband, but there are limited opportunities. The 1996 act allows ISPs to build their own infrastructure, but that doesn't make sense in rural America."

ISPs need to look at alternatives to DSL and cable. "A lot of our customers are offering some DSL but are making no money. It's an opportunity to keep customers even if they do so at no profit. ISPs cannot get into cable because they cannot access the cable infrastructure."

Burgess says that Wi-Fi is the answer. "It's not as cookie-cutter as dialup. You have to be careful of things like pine trees and tall buildings. If you're serving a small town, getting space on a water tower is great. We've been doing fixed wireless for a year and a half. The biggest problem that we see is how to charge for the expensive CPE."

Although the fixed wireless business is growing, outsourced IT and dialup remain the core of Foundation Technologies' business.

Applied appliances
The company is also exploring other ventures. It builds an "enterprise passport" appliance that provides all-in-one services for small businesses. The company sells the appliance through ISPs, using them as channel partners to get small business customers.

Foundation Technologies also builds an anti-virus and anti-spam appliance it calls the SPF. The anti-spam software uses blacklist, whitelist, and keyword filtering to fight spam. The anti-virus technology, Burgess says, is proprietary. It tracks connection patterns and stops viruses before they get to the server. It is particularly good at stopping worms.

Of course, whatever server side anti-virus an ISP deploys, Burgess suggests recommending that end users have client side anti-virus software of their own. "You can always get a virus from a floppy disk," he notes. "And SPF doesn't protect you from HTTP viruses either."

Another appliance, FT Director, allows ISPs to direct traffic to a specific page, initially. It could, for example, warn users that there will be downtime between 2 and 3 in the morning.

The company also makes a FT VPN Director with 1024 bit security. The product, which is being tested, was developed for a customer who wanted secure access to an IBM AS/400 database from home.

A foundation in Montana
We spoke to a satisfied customer in Lincoln County, Montana, the northeast corner of the state. Libby, Mont.-based KooteNet is a county-funded ISP that currently claims about 2,500 subscribers. The ISP was founded in 1994 with a $25,000 loan from the county. The loan purchased some used equipment. Kim Fox, the ISP's executive director, says the ISP is now "county owned but member funded. We repaid the grant."

KooteNet, named after the Kootenai, the people who first lived in the area, also gets some useful retail space from the county—in the basement of the local public library.

Fox says that people like to be able to talk to their ISP. "People come to the office to get computer training. People also treat it as a store front. They can actually come in and sit down and talk to someone. People still want that personal contact."

Fox says that Foundation Technologies had everything the ISP was looking for. The ISP needed remote management—and honesty. "We did three phone interviews and started the contract in June of this year. I've been in the ISP business for a year, and in this business, I've learned there are people at the sales end of things who will tell you what they think you want to hear, and there are the tech folks who are honest. Foundation Technologies will tell us about a problem and say, 'let's do some tests.' I love them!"

— End