iUHBA’s audacious 10G broadband plan

His associates put him in the “top 1% of visionaries in the world,” he says. He has voiced aspirations to be the world’s richest man. And next spring he plans to start rolling out 10-Gb/s broadband to millions of US homes.

So who is Neal Lachman?

The outspoken entrepreneur, prone to oversized ambitions and an active presence in online social networks and blogs, is currently seeking investment for iUHBA, a startup aimed at a revolutionary jump in broadband speeds that Lachman, 39, says is the culmination of nearly a decade of work developing the strategy with colleagues. “We perfected it in the last nine and a half years,” he said.

iUHBA, (an acronym for ultrahigh-bandwidth access) plans to roll out a converged wireless/wireline network, offering wireless service at speeds up to 100 Mb/s and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service at 10-Gb/s using a mix of commercial 802.11n-based next-generation WiFi and active Ethernet access gear but transitioning over time to its own internally designed equipment that will make use of patents the company has acquired (and some it has yet to acquire).

The strategy

In March the company plans to start building a network in the Great Lakes and Northeast regions, leading with wireless service and following with 10-Gb/s FTTH, reaching 20 million premises with fiber by the end of 2016. Those 10-Gb/s connections, which would enable a range of consumer services including HDTV, would be increased to 40 Gb/s each within the next decade and to 100 Gb/s starting in 2020, according to iUHBA’s plans.

That $40-billion rollout requires an initial investment of $1.5 billion, Lachman said, after which revenues will fund operations. iUHBA is currently “almost done” closing an initial $2.5-million funding round from Dutch investors and plans to raise the full $1.5 billion sometime in the next nine months, Lachman said. (A Dutch citizen who has also lived in Vancouver, Lachman is also pitching a large broadband network in Holland.)

The dutch investment will fund a “proof of concept” in New York state, where iUHBA will lease capacity on a publicly owned middle-mile fiber network that county officials expect to complete next year. Following a five-county rollout there, iUHBA plans to expand by acquiring a large publicly held carrier in the Northeast. The proposal for that move, which will require about half a billion dollars, will come sometime in the next week or so, Lachman said.

iUHBA plans to begin by launching wireless service as a mobile virtual network operator. It would then deploy the fixed wireless network, feeding it with fiber connections from the middle-mile network and rolling out 10-Mb/s to 100-Mb/s wireless service. Eventually iUHBA would extend that fiber network to homes and businesses, using fiber-connected structures as wireless base stations in the process.

“The killer issue now for the mobile industry is fiber to the cell sites,” Lachman said. “We bypass that problem because we’re going to build fiber anyway. We’re of the opinion that we should not bypass any structure. When we start building, we’ll lower the price and give it out for free so everyone allows us to connect their structure, whether it’s an MDU or a single occupancy unit. The buildings will form the base stations’ [points of presence]. Because we build out everywhere anyway, any kind of structure would be available to us as a hub or as a fiberoptic-enabled base station. We build wireless, and it supports our fiber-to-the-home, and we build fiber-to-the-home, which supports wireless.”

Next: The technology and the team