FullNet dials for dollars

FullNet Communications is literally dialing for dollars. The Oklahoma-based ISP/CLEC recently raised $925,000 to complete a $1 million carrier-neutral co-location facility and corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City that will serve as a base of operations for its ambitious statewide telecommunications efforts.

FullNet has three goals: consolidate ISPs in dial-up and provide connectivity for businesses; provide servers and server space in a Web-hosting environment; and provide carrier-neutral co-location facilities for telcos, said founder CEO Timothy Kilkenny.

"We do it in rural Oklahoma," he emphasized. "We already have [an ISP] network statewide and are adding more dial-up to it. Along with being a CLEC, where you can get reciprocal compensation, makes us have an advantage over the normal ISP."

Kilkenny emphasized that FullNet is "not actually out doing two-way calling and long distance" like most CLECs. And, while the company has good cash flow, "we're not positive EBITDA yet, but we should be this quarter, and we're hoping to be net positive by the end of the year."

Most of FullNet’s money has been spent on the carrier-neutral facility in downtown Oklahoma City, Kilkenny said.

"Nobody around me is carrier-neutral," he emphasized. "We are the only play in our area, if you want to come in and buy bandwidth from somebody else or carrier-to-carrier equipment," he said.

But that's only FullNet's most visible piece. The company also is in the fixed-wireless space, where appropriate.

"We do [fixed broadband] wireless but we don't make a big deal of it, because we know the unlicensed bandwidth is a big problem," he explained. "It's sizzle and everybody likes it and everybody likes to talk about it, but we've had two years experience with it [and] unless you're going to get licensed bandwidth, it can be a problem."

In addition, FullNet will offer DSL in 33 Oklahoma cities where "we're buying up a lot of these ISPs for very little money … then we have somebody to push the broadband app in these cities," he said. "Outside these cities, we have wireless and we do some ISDN."

And then there's the old standby--dial-up.

"In Oklahoma, there's 3 million in population and about 700,000 of them live outside city limits. They have 33.6K dial-up, because the phone companies are so poor in those areas that they can't even give them 56K in many instances," he said. "There are a lot of people, farmers, ranchers, people who live outside the city limits … [who] can't get bandwidth. That's what we're doing … bridging the digital divide."