AN ANTEBELLUM BROADBAND PLAN

The broadband wireless industry hasn't presented much of a threat to the incumbents so far. In small, underserved markets or rural areas they may dominate because they face little or no competition. In any urban area, however, this new wave of wireless carriers has taken a handful of customers here or there but has made barely a blip in the overall market — unless that market happens to be Jackson, Miss.

In the two years since fixed wireless carrier Air2LAN has been plugging away at its first market, it has managed to rack up some impressive results in the small and medium business space. Air2LAN provides data services to one out every six businesses in the mid-sized city, and according to its own market research, it has a 33% lock on the roughly 1750 businesses in the Jackson metro area that use broadband. In an industry that's accustomed to dealing in fractional percentages when talking about market share, Air2LAN has pulled quite a feat in its hometown, a feat upon which Air2LAN plans to build not only in Jackson but throughout the rest of the South.

“This market is far from saturated,” said Jai Bhagat, CEO of Air2LAN and one of the original founders of wireless paging carrier SkyTel. “We see a lot more business potential for data in Jackson and in all our other markets.”

Air2LAN's unlicensed spectrum point-to-multipoint service is targeted at that niche between DSL and T-1 connectivity, providing 1.5 Mb/s of capacity at $300 a month. In Jackson, a typical T-1 from BellSouth costs $700 a month, while an ADSL business line runs $100. Basically, Air2LAN overcomes the capacity and symmetry limitations of DSL, but far undercuts the price of T-1. That targets it perfectly at the small business market, which turned out to be much more than just a niche, but the majority of Jackson's business community.

Air2LAN blanketed the city in cell sites, deploying 20 base stations on Jackson's limited tower infrastructure. Each Trango Broadband Wireless base station covered a radius of five to seven square miles, allowing Air2LAN to encompass Jackson and its outlying communities. Deployed mainly at 5.8 GHz, the network faces line-of-site issues, but Air2LAN is able to bring the city's remaining customers on net using leased T-1 lines, giving it complete network coverage for multisite customers. From there Air2LAN began setting up wireless virtual private networks across corporate and institutional campuses, using its base stations as central routers as well as gateways to the Internet. At the customer premises equipment, Air2LAN builds LANs using Wi-Fi to wirelessly connect users in those offices, creating an all-in-one-wireless package that handles the local, wide area and virtual private networking of a single business from the same network operation center.

While the technology worked, Air2LAN still had to make people aware of it. It helped that Air2LAN was a homegrown company, led by one of Jackson's industry luminaries. Bhagat's SkyTel, before it was sold to fellow Mississippian WorldCom, was one of the largest two-way messaging companies in the world, and Bhagat's links into Jackson's small but significant telecom and technical community helped. Bhagat hired sales reps and operations staff directly from that community and made sure that Air2LAN participated fully in any community events. Then the carrier launched an extensive radio, television, billboard and print advertising campaign.

“Our brand is very well known in this market,” Bhagat said. “There are few businesses that have not heard of us even if they may not use our service.”

The efforts paid dividends. Jackson was the first market Air2LAN launched, and it is by far the carrier's most penetrated. Jackson accounts for half of the company's 1100 customer accounts, even though Air2LAN has deployed in 14 markets total, including markets as large as Houston, Memphis and New Orleans. But Bhagat doesn't plan to let the other markets languish. He plans to apply the same strategy he adopted with Jackson throughout the rest of the South, starting with involving his company with the local communities in those markets as quickly as possible.

Admittedly, Bhagat and Air2LAN won't have the homefield advantage they had in Jackson and many of those markets — Houston and New Orleans in particular — are much larger than the sleepy state capital of Mississippi. But Bhagat said he thinks that Air2LAN's business model can be scaled to any size market. It merely requires providing the necessary focus and hiring the right people.

Air2LAN isn't just exporting its Jackson staff to its new markets. It's hiring home-grown marketers, salespeople and technicians and when it can it tries to utilize the connections of every small carrier it buys.

“We've been growing both by building and through acquisition,” Bhagat said. “It takes some time to fully deploy in these markets, but we plan to devote the same attention to those cities as we did to Jackson.”