NextWeb to acquire Worldwide Wireless Networks’ assets

NextWeb is grabbing an opportunity to become one of the nation’s largest fixed broadband wireless players by acquiring the assets of Chapter 11-ridden Worldwide Wireless Networks (WWN). If approved, NextWeb would add WWN’s Southern California customer base to its Northern California operations.

“There’s a tremendous synergy between the two companies,” said David Williams, NextWeb’s vice president of marketing and business development. “We both focus on the enterprise business customers and we both have separate markets. It really adds to our footprint capabilities."

The big difference between the two companies is that NextWeb is making money and hopes to reach break-even by next summer, while WWN is so busy paying down debt it can’t get out from under its financial burdens.

“They have decent revenue growth for their market right now,” said Williams. “The raised a tremendous amount of debt and servicing that debt is inflating their month-over-month loss. They definitely need to go through a restructuring period and need access additional capital to bring that operation to break-even.”

NextWeb will do its part by infusing management and funding, while retaining the existing employee and customer base.

“We’re going into this fully funded to bring both markets to break-even by the middle of next year,” Williams said.

NextWeb sells service to enterprise customers with packages that start at 2 megabits per second [Mb/s] of downstream speed. It uses a cellular network design to get around line-of-sight problems and to boost bandwidth. It will use the same system with WWN’s customer base, said Williams.

“The combined resources of the company are going to allow us to offer new services to both sets of our customer bases and roll out new services, including voice services as well as online storage, videoconferencing and some of the other things that are becoming more popular these days,” Williams said. “Combined, we’ll be one of the largest, if not the largest in the country with this business model.”