Fixed Wireless Business

Big Plans in Bay Bulls

Right now, it's a small, local WISP powered by a wind turbine on a hillside. But with VoIP and video plans, this little business could get big very fast.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 6, 2004]

It's right near the big city, but when it comes to Internet service, the place has nothing. The town of Bay Bulls (pop. 1,014 in 2001 [wikipedia]) is only about 19 kilometers (just under 12 miles) by road from Newfoundland's provincial capital, St. John's (pop. 99,182 in 2001). But whereas the capital has fiber, coax, and copper broadband, Bay Bulls barely has dialup.

The reason is topography. Patrick DeBourke, co-founder of brand new startup WISP Bye-Net Wireless, says that can be changed in a single hop. With equipment from San Diego, Calif.-based Trango Broadband, he realized he could bring a signal from St. John's to the highest peak nearby, which is 800 feet above sea level.

But the problem that stumped him initially is probably what stumped anyone who might have come before him. How would you power the access point?

"I thought, 'there's gotta be a way,'" says DeBourke. "So I called a wind turbine person who has the expertise." Seems like DeBourke knows a lot of people, as any entrepreneur should.

Located on the eastern edge of Canada, Bay Bulls has wind in abundance, coming right off the Atlantic Ocean. "Even on a calm day down here, it's always turning up there," says DeBourke.

The turbine has a rectifier, batteries for storage of two days' worth of electricity, and a small hut on the mountain tied down like a tent, but with steel cables. The link to St. John's is a 5.8 GHz point-to-point (PtP) TrangoLINK 10.

The signal is spread across Bay Bulls with a few of Trango's 60 degree sector point-to-multipoint (PtMP) Access5830 access points (APs).

I happened upon an oarlock
The whole project started because of a single coincidence. "My friend Terry Caine was doing work for me extending oarlocks on a boat. I was visiting, and I looked at his computer. It was as slow as dialup. You could see the screen building up. I asked him how much he was paying for it, and it was a lot. I worked with Nortel and with COMSAT in Maryland (he had satellite), and I suggested exploring wireless."

He was told it could not be done, because if it could be done someone would have done it already. Like many WISP entrepreneurs, he received that advice, ignored it, and proved it wrong.

But DeBourke's planning to serve much more than plain old broadband.

He has already shared the movie Gladiator in a non-commercial test. He claims it required only 2.5 Mbps of bandwidth. DeBourke hopes to obtain licensing permission on a revenue share or per-user basis to be able to show up to 250 movies over the network on a subscription basis.

DeBourke will need a good encoder, a cheap decoder for the customer equipment, and he will need to persuade end users to view movies on their computer instead of on their television. He's interested in an encoder from ADTEC, but is still shopping around for the rest of the equipment.

If prices of video equipment change in the same way that prices have changed for VoIP, as DeBourke hopes they will, this video business plan has a future. DeBourke is also interested in providing VoIP with the assistance of Canadian CLEC Group Telecom (GTI).

Whereas video is part of DeBourke's future, for Trango, delivering video over wireless would be a return to the company's roots. Trango Broadband is a relatively new wholly owned subsidiary of Trango Systems, which supplies wireless video solutions to municipalities, law enforcement, and anyone else who uses video surveillance as part of a security system.

If his video plans are successful, DeBourke will need a lot of bandwidth, but he is confident about being able to obtain whatever he needs. That's because he has an ace up his sleeve. Although he's running the equipment and customers he has now on a basic T-1 line, his location in the suburbs of St. John's, in the office of partner Terry Craine, has access to twelve fiber lines, he says. So if this WISP wants to enter the city market, the bandwidth it would need to do so should be available (for a price).

For the moment, he's working on the Bay Bulls network, which has 30 subscribers, 20 of which are small businesses and home offices (SOHO). But he does think about growing much larger.

"We'd look for an investor at that point," admits DeBourke. "There's a tremendous opportunity. The big phone companies have become so complacent about what they're willing to do. They don't seem to want to change."

—End