The Coach

Bart Saxey: Born and bred in the Beehive State. Spent the boom in San Diego, came back home to start another explosion. Recently named president of Broadband Central, a year-old Wi-Fi WISP boldly hailing itself the largest wireless broadband provider in the West.

I opened MicroSkills in 1999. It's a tech training center in San Diego. We could turn a UPS driver into a network engineer. I was not a technical trainer — my skills were in operating a business: cash management, projection budgeting, operations.

I was born and raised in Utah. I used to coach little league with the Broadband Central CEO before I left for San Diego. We kept in touch. Now I'm coaching Broadband Central.

In Utah, wireless ISPs are coming out of the woodwork, from Mom-and-Pop shops to Utah Wireless and Sprint. Because of their line-of-sight technology and their profit models, they haven't fared very well.

CFOs must have created their business models. They thought if they got big towers and 15-mile cells, they could convert more customers. But there's only a finite amount of spectrum, and you use more spectrum the further it travels. We're able to get more users in a shorter distance. We have a proprietary 802.11 product called the “Blue Zone.” (We just thought it sounded cool.) It's a mile-diameter circle serviced by a T-1, a control access unit and a CPE. Projections are based on 134 users per zone, but we're finding more in the 200 range.

Our model supports itself much better than a larger footprint. A homeowner can sponsor a zone for $10,000. Once it's lit, there's a 60/40 profit split after costs are met. Our only advertising was 400 fliers we handed out to homeowners in Salt Lake City. We now have 364 zones sold in Utah and more than 3700 zones sponsored in a dozen states. (We're not at liberty to share how many have been deployed.)

It makes sense to start the blue zones here. Utah has a high penetration of PCs. I think we're ranked fifth in the nation in per capita PCs. My former colleagues in San Diego think we all have two wives out here. I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but you'd have to check with my wife. There are a lot of other states that have more of that going on than we do. There are guys in California with three or four wives.