BOB making all-wireless work

From atop the Equinix facility in Chicago’s South Loop area, in a carrier hotel which once housed the R.R. Donnelley printing plant that churned out telephone directories among other things, Business Only Broadband’s radios look west, north and south – eastern coverage isn’t needed since that’s Lake Michigan. From its four radio sites in downtown Chicago, BOB claims there isn’t a building it can’t reach.

“We essentially mirror the fiber networks but in the sky,” Kingston said. “We have multiple self-healing rings, we use 48-volt DC power and Cisco 6524 Metro Ethernet routers.”

BOB can offer customers up to 100 megabits per second of capacity, although most are connected at speeds closer to 10 Mb/s. “Part of our value proposition is that we can give customers flexibility,” Craven said. “Our network is 100% Ethernet, and it’s very flexible. We have MPLS Layer 3 solutions that are scalable on demand.”

Kingston said BOB has not seen much wireless competition at the high end of its market, although it competes with Towerstream for SMB customers.

“We have first-mover advantage,” he said. “We have FCC-licensed spectrum at 11 GHz, 18 Ghz and 23 GHz – it’s hard for someone to come in behind us and get roof availability and spectrum availability. When you get to the large enterprise space, we don’t have any competition.”

There is a dramatic contrast between BOB’s network and what Kingston knew in his days with MFS and later, XO Communications.

“Ten years ago, when I was a division president with XO, we had a 30,000-square-foot raised-floor facility,” Kingston said. Within Chicago, BOB has one small rack of Cisco gear at the downtown Equinix facility, another with Equinix in Elk Grove Village to the northwest and a third in an XO facility in Oak Brook to the west.