Broadband business wireless firm expands to NYC

Its nickname is humble – BOB Broadband – but a new wireless service provider has lofty ambitions for providing wireless services to large businesses, particularly those in financial services, using licensed spectrum. Business Only Broadband has been operating in Chicago and this week announced its plans to expand into New York City, focusing on providing reliable service on a 100% wireless network.

To spearhead its NYC push, which includes Manhattan and surrounding areas such as Brooklyn and northern New Jersey, BOB hired as its president Alan Rosenberg, the former global vice president for Federal Business Development at Global Crossing.

“The technology and the cost to deploy infrastructure, the way we do that makes it almost unreasonable not to go into New York, said Rich Kingston, CEO of BOB. “It costs the same amount of money to put up a transmission site whether you are in Manhattan, Kansas or Manhattan, New York. We can cover that area for a fraction of what it costs to deploy fiber and reach many more customers.”

BOB uses wireless technology in the licensed spectrum ranges of 11 GigaHertz, 18 GHz and 23 GHz to build what Kingston calls “a state-of-the-art, carrier-class Ethernet network for which the transport just happens to be wireless.” In Chicago, the company has 30 transmission sites and about 300 customers, he said.

For most of those customers, which are financial services companies, the initial appeal of BOB is having a backup service provider that doesn’t share any facilities with the local incumbent.

“Our target is large enterprise and mainly the financial vertical,” Kingston said. “First and foremost, they want diversity from the embedded infrastructure. If you are a financial services company, you can’t afford any downtime. That means hard dollars lost, credibility lost. All of these companies have dual networks that they overlay to get 100% network uptime. What our clients see and know is that having two different fiber providers isn’t the right solution because in many instances, [their networks] come together in a manhole or a conduit.”

By offering a 100% wireless network, with no leased landline infrastructure in its backbone, BOB is providing true diversity, Kingston said. And its customers are finding BOB’s network can do much more.

“Because we have deployed the latest technology and the latest MPLS IP architecture, our customers started to see more things they could do with the network,” he said. “It is more efficient, more cost-effective.”

(continued on next page)