Fixed Wireless Business

WISPs Work Together

One of the largest WISPs in the U.S. (absolutely the largest by some metrics) has a system in place for working with other WISPs to extend all parties' coverage areas.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 20, 2006]

We've written about Fremont, Calif.-based NextWeb before, notably during the announcement late last year that the company would be acquired by Covad. We wrote Covad's Acquisition of NextWeb Makes Sense.

Now we're talking to NextWeb about the SkyWeb Alliance. The alliance has been around since 2003. Originally, explains Eric Warren, NextWeb's vice president of marketing and business development, the alliance allowed three California WISPs (NextWeb, SkyPipeline, and SkyRiver) to work together, and at the time, Warren was with SkyPipepline.

The companies joined to issue an RFP and chose Axxcelera. "SkyRiver decided to also used Trango, but NextWeb and SkyPipeline became Axxcelera shops. Redwire and West Coast Communications joined the alliance in 2004, and NextPhase and Gatespeed joined in 2005."

The main benefit of working together has to do with the realities of non line of sight (NLOS) fixed wireless broadband service. "Any customer might theoretically be in our coverage area but might be obstructed, or might be too far from the base station," says Warren. "With the alliance, we can often pick up a customer from the base station of a partner."

You need a system to work together
The alliance requires a detailed agreement on pricing and the process of order taking. Generally, the company providing the connectivity gets about 50 percent of the retail price of the connection.

But pricing's easy compared to order taking. NextWeb has its own home grown online order system, and likes to work with partners who have something similar.

"We don't give partners access to it; but they can plug into it. Smaller WISPs have a customer contact database and just update data fields as the sales process moves along: customer signed agreement on x day, scheduled the install on y day. The order flow is important. We go through the process step by step, saying which person to contact at the partner, and the same thing on the tech support side. If we own the customer relationship but the service is offered by a partner, we own the initial call and level 1 tech troubleshooting, such as does your router have power. Level 2 tech support comes from the partner, but our level one support has to be able to contact their tech support and provide a circuit ID or customer number," says Warren.

Often, the customer will have one location served by an alliance partner along with several locations served by NextWeb. "Solving a problem for these customers has to be as easy at the partner site as at the sites whose connectivity is supplied by NextWeb," says Warren.

Normally, NextWeb invites a company to join when a salesperson has made sales but has been unable to connect them, Warren explains. "The salesperson finds a company with wireless service in that area and brings them to me as a candidate for an alliance. We have a handshake agreement on pricing and order a circuit to see how it goes. We don't have a lot of partners, and some that went through the process didn't make the cut. We didn't like the way they did billing or customer service, or didn't like the equipment they used."

Warren worked for SkyPipeline until it was acquired by NextWeb. "We don't weclome people into the alliance in order to acquire them," he says, "but sometimes that happens."

Now that NextWeb has expanded to Las Vegas, the company is looking for partners there as well as in California. He says the company gets leads across the U.S., but not regularly in any one location. "We do get leads in other areas, other parts of the country, but not too many," explains Warren. Currently, the company refers potential customers to WISPs it knows, but Warren believes the company could be earning revenue from the referrals.

"We've just started to reach out to WISPs outside of California," he says.

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