BOB making all-wireless work

CHICAGO -- Richard Kingston and Chris Craven spent their early telecom careers trying to convince businesses to buy fiber optics from Metropolitan Fiber Systems. Now the two men are pitching the same companies but with a very different, all-wireless solution.

“We have customers who say, ‘Didn’t you used to tell me fiber was best?’” admits Kingston, chief executive officer of Business Only Broadband, which has been serving Chicago and in January expanded into New York City. But Kingston said it’s no longer a hard sell to convince companies looking for geographic diversity to give wireless a try.

“I spent 15 years building fiber optic networks, and I know they all get built in the same places,” said Craven, BOB’s chief technology officer and one of the very early MFS employees. “If you add to that the fact that fiber is still not ubiquitous, we have a lot more to offer.”

BOB operates 31 wireless sites in Chicago to cover the city and major suburban areas, using DragonWave point-to-point radios at the commercial 11 GigaHertz, 18 GHz and 23 GHz spectrum bands and Motorola Canopy point-to-multipoint wireless systems to serve smaller businesses with multiple locations.

“Our core backbone network is all DragonWave,” Kingston said. “We are 100% wireless, and we own all that. We don’t lease facilities. So we are completely diverse of the embedded facilities.”

That diversity is BOB’s primary value proposition and what gets the company in the door, Kingston said, but that doesn’t mean the wireless network is used solely as a backup to a wireline operation.

“Many clients use us as their primary network,” Kingston said. “And many clients use us in a co-primary way. Diversity is the approach they are trying to achieve, but very few have the capacity sitting there idle, almost all of them have it as part of their production network.”