Gator aid

Brian Andrew, president and CEO of e-xpedient, was just what Donna Scarlatelli needed when she found herself knee-deep in alligators. Andrew, a transplanted New Zealander who is fond of surfing, is quickly adapting to the Florida custom of wrestling with them.

Scarlatelli's Miami-based law firm — Bander, Fox-Isicoff & Associates — was surrounded by the snapping green critters, facing an unbending federal deadline without a high-speed Internet connection after its ISP, NorthPoint Communications, went dark.

The law firm's clients — mostly aliens seeking U.S. work permits — were counting on Scarlatelli and her partners to complete intricate applications found on federal government Web sites. A missed April 30 deadline meant that those clients would most likely be asked to leave the country. To complicate matters, Scarlatelli says, the attorneys had been encouraging clients to use e-mail rather than join the thousands of calls that flood the office — and some clients didn't even know the company's phone number.

“The alligators were really biting,” she says. “Talk about malpractice, bar complaints. We had people's money and we would not have delivered. This was a critical deadline.”

The normal ways of dealing with this problem weren't panning out. Scarlatelli asked the company's computer consultant to do something, anything, to maintain connectivity but was told it would take at least three weeks to get a replacement.

The law firm resorted to dial-up, told employees to work on home computers and thrashed about for an answer.

As a last resort, Scarlatelli contacted her building's management, who mentioned that Andrew's firm was wiring the building for high-speed Internet access. Joel Ciniero, e-xpedient's on-site sales rep, was eager to work with the immigration attorney. “Joel came in and said, ‘We can do this for you in 48 hours,’ Scarlatelli recalls. “And I said, ‘Our guy can't do it for three weeks, and you can do it in 48 hours?’”

Ciniero would have said 48 minutes, but the wiring was incomplete.

“If you had told me 48 minutes, I probably would have hung up because I wouldn't have believed you,” Scarlatelli says. “Forty-eight hours was a reasonable period of time.”

As it was, e-xpedient hooked up Bander, Fox-Isicoff & Associates, and the law firm met the immigration paperwork deadline.

Oh, and everybody took off May 1.

All in a day's work

Andrew says that kind of service will help his company expand its footprint through Cleveland, Orlando and Jacksonville, Fla., Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and, of course, Miami. It's even more crucial, he says, as other service providers increasingly leave the scene and strand customers without service.

It would be easy to pigeonhole e-xpedient — Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited is the parent company — as a high-speed point-to-point broadband fixed wireless data services provider. It uses licensed bandwidth in the 18 GHz, 28 GHz and 38 GHz ranges where available and more unconventional, unlicensed 60 GHz radios coupled with free space optics in Miami.

But trying to slot the company based on its delivery mechanism only lights Andrew's fuse.

For one thing, he says, e-xpedient doesn't do point-to-point wireless. “We do consecutive. There's a big difference,” he says. “We never have a big antenna farm” because e-xpedient hops from building to building in a loop.

e-xpedient wires buildings to transceive at least 100 Mb/s of bandwidth. Each customer in the building gets the full 100 Mb/s, but rather than charging for the speed, e-xpedient bills for monthly consumption. A customer downloading and uploading a ton of graphics pays more than one that does mostly e-mail.

“Right now there's not anybody selling the customers 100 Mb Internet for the price that we do,” Andrew says. “Wireless, wireline — it doesn't really matter.”

Beyond speed

Speed's nice, but the price break's the clincher, says Marc Schlesinger, president of Millennium Computer Services, which chose e-xpedient's service for law firm client Goldstein & Tanen.

e-xpedient pricing plans

Service plan	Customer use	Megabytes/month	Monthly fee
e-xpedient DE	Dial-up Internet service	Up to 1000	$100
e-xpedient XE1	Low-end DSL and ISDN	1001-2000	$250
e-xpedient XE2	Fractional T-1, fully maximized DSL or high-end ISDN/frame services	2001-10,000	$500
e-xpedient TE	T-1 or equivalent frame services	10,001-20,000	$1000
e-xpedient Viper1	Fully maximized T-1 or multiple T-1s	20,001-50,000	$2500
e-xpedient Viper2	Multiple T-1s or DS-3	50,001-100,000	$5500
Source: e-xpedient

“The bottom line is money. Speed really wasn't that much of an issue,” says Schlesinger. He was reluctant to transfer his customers to e-xpedient, especially because he was content with the 1.4 Mb/s access he was already getting from Aspire Systems. But e-xpedient's ground-floor $250 monthly fee for the 24 law firm workstations tipped the scales.

“We were talking somewhere in the neighborhood of a $175 a month difference,” he says. “That's something to think about when you're on a monthly budget.”

Still, Schlesinger says, he was cautious. “It wasn't really skepticism; it was just a little bit of nervousness that something wouldn't work out well for my customers.”

e-xpedient then “did something really nice for us,” Schlesinger continues. The law firm was locked into a contract with Aspire, so e-xpedient worked out a two-free-month deal to even things out. “That was really the kicker. Those guys came around and said, ‘We'll do what we need to do to make your customer happy,’” Schlesinger says. “That's what my basis in life is.”

There are those among e-xpedient's customers, such as Madhu Sethi, technical executive vice president of WorldLink Technologies, who think the company's methods may actually be a bit extravagant.

Sethi noticed multiple optical links on his building and “thought it was overkill, because unless I work for the CIA and have to be online 24/7, 100% of the time, it's too much,” he says.

WorldLink provides wireless Internet access in the Asian Pacific Rim, so Sethi figures he should know how to make the business pay off. “I look at what I'm doing in the Philippines, and we're certainly not doing this much at all,” he says. “Our business plan does not allow us to spend that much money.”

Sethi's Miami headquarters building is a “mini-hub,” says Andrew, who bristles at the suggestion his design is overkill.

“We're going to own your business as you go forward,” he told Sethi at a recent meeting. “The architecture is extremely capacity-based. We're not trying to rape and pillage you. We want to keep you as our customer forever.”

That will require architectural changes that match technology shifts, but e-xpedient has taken that into account. For example, the company uses 60 GHz radios and free-space optic lasers on the same buildings in Miami. It's not overkill, insists Donnie Burt, e-xpedient's advanced technology vice president.

“We did a very careful selection of what unlicensed devices we would use as a service provider and judiciously selected 60 GHz and the free space optics,” Burt says. “They each have unique properties that mitigate interference and allow us to do dense deployments without having to worry about someone coming in at a later time and putting up devices that may potentially interfere.”

Both are used for another logical reason: weather. Lasers don't work in fog; radios have trouble with rain; neither is down at the same time. Similarly, although a helicopter might fly in front of a pencil-thin laser beam, the RF signal would be flexible enough to go around it. Even the Canon laser transceiving devices use a platform developed for roving hand-held video cameras so they can adjust for motion that occurs when tall buildings sway in the wind. The signal, Burt says, is never disconnected.

Also in e-xpedient's architecture, line-of-sight is really that — a line of sight. No e-xpedient building is more than two miles from another in the ring, and most are much closer in.

“The combination of the two [technologies] gives us the ability to go and get any building anywhere in any city at five 9s reliability. Once you have our product, you never want it to go away,” Andrew says.

Room to grow

People won't throw off the security blanket of established Internet access providers based on whiz-bang technology. If what they have is working, they're not moving.

As in the case of Scarlatelli's law firm, though, it's not always working. The data competitive local exchange carriers are hurting, and commercial point-to-point fixed wireless providers such as Winstar Communications and Teligent are gasping for air.

“With Teligent, Winstar and XO barely scraping by, the overall market has some issues,” says Peter Jarich, analyst with The Strategis Group.

That doesn't mean there isn't a market for a company like e-xpedient.

“There's a compelling case because what most people don't realize is most fiber doesn't necessarily hit buildings,” Jarich says. “There may be tons of fiber out there, but it's connecting carrier hotels or various co-locations or peering points. That's really where wireless — and free-space optics — fits in.”

Andrew, although willing to talk technology until the alligators roost, refuses to dwell on his delivery mechanism. He's also not interested in shifting his business focus. “We are concentrating on the top businesses that have cash, have revenue and can pay for things they're not getting,” he says.

If he wants to expand that philosophy to the international market, Sethi is available as a partner in a joint venture overseas. The Asian market, Sethi points out, doesn't have the building access issues that many U.S.-based service providers face.

Andrew, who is noncommittal about any potential international partnerships, says the U.S. market isn't that bad. “If a customer wants it in a building, invariably you'll be allowed in,” he says. “The landlord is there to serve the tenant.”

Richard White, a research analyst with The Aberdeen Group, says that must be the case for e-xpedient's business plan to succeed.

“They seem to have success making sure they target certain buildings that they feel have the highest success of getting into, and their equipment doesn't take up much space,” White says. “The only concern would be the extent to which they can get into buildings.”

It's the size of the pipe

A side benefit to all of e-xpedient's bandwidth is voice over IP. e-xpedient doesn't charge anything extra if customers want to do IP voice, which some have done, Andrew says. “When we come along, it makes what they already have [in the way of IP voice services] work nicer,” he says.

Still, he says, e-xpedient's biggest draw is e-mail — and all the communications iterations that have grown up around it. “They can't live without it; 80% of the traffic that we have is e-mail,” he notes.

That business model works, says The Aberdeen Group's White. “They're pushing Internet access as the killer app. These other ISPs haven't done as well before because they haven't really given people true broadband Internet access that they need,” he says.

Sethi, personally, buys in. Before a horde of e-xpedient execs descended on his office recently, he was taking e-mail to its next step by “chatting with India, Orlando and the Philippines. That's the way to communicate,” he says.

It's also the way to use a 100-meg pipe.

‘We're not trying to rape and pillage you. We want to keep you as our customer forever.’
— Brian Andrew

“You start opening multiple windows and attaching large e-mails to it. If you don't have a big pipe, it's not worth it,” he said.

Luis Chumaceiro, president of Very Clear Voice Communications, understands the need for a big communications pipe. The Venezuelan sells long-distance services out of Miami that connect U.S. carriers to Latin American circuits. He uses e-xpedient's Internet connection to provide access for carriers to his switch, and VCV operates some routes via voice over IP, he says.

VCV is a small business with only eight customers, but it carries a load. “Only on the circuit I'm using to send to Spain, that was 7 million minutes a month,” Chumaceiro said. “It's a lot for us because we're a four-person company, but it's not that much in the global sense. But it is a bunch of bandwidth.”

e-xpedient's ability to defeat latency is important as Chumaceiro communicates among his various carrier customers. “Between your network and somebody else, you can't tell [it's IP],” he says.

Chumaceiro, too, has been spoiled by e-xpedient's speed. “I can't deal with anything slower than what I have right now, so I don't have a computer at my house. I can't imagine going back to not only dial-up, but back to a T-1,” he says.

Andrew likes to hear that from customers because his business depends on delivering unmatched speed.

“When I go to a building, nobody is going to buy DSL from me when they can get it from Ma Bell,” he says. “I have to be extreme broadband. I have to be 100 megabits or more.”

But White wonders whether e-xpedient can survive on those ground-level buy-ins or whether it needs to have customers who continually upgrade their services and consume more bandwidth.

“My whole concern would be the extent to which they could generate real earnings based on customers' use of the data,” he suggests.

For Scarlatelli, the speed and the bandwidth are almost irrelevant. Service wins the day.

“We had a critical need. We needed expedient service,” she says with a chuckle. “It was wonderful that the program we were going to be purchasing was faster and was going to give us more capability, but I didn't even care about that at that point.”

Then there's the network's dependability.

“The previous carrier, NorthPoint, was constantly down. Something was always going wrong here,” she says. There was always an excuse, but “when you're not technologically savvy, you don't understand the distinctions. All we know is it doesn't work, and everybody's screaming because we've all become so reliant on these systems.”

It's a jungle out there in the data communications world, which makes it nice when someone like Brian Andrew comes along to stave off the critters. “In Florida they're all alligators,” Scarlatelli concludes. “We're the sharks; they're the alligators.”