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Carrier Services
Provider Pares Operational Costs
UnwiredOnline deploys Dataprobe for monitoring
by Jim Barthold
UnwiredOnline, a fixed wireless ISP (WISP) in Junction City, Ore. shows that you don’t need to be big to provide a telecommunications service. Dataprobe, a 36-year-old family-run business in Northern New Jersey, is making a living serving those types of customers.
Dataprobe is providing UnwiredOnline with remote monitoring, management and control of six radio towers that the wireless ISP has scattered throughout the rural Oregon countryside. Without Dataprobe’s iBoot gear, UnwiredOnline needed to send technicians on an hour-plus ride to reboot and restart the antennas – a cost for the company and an inconvenience for the 190 residential and commercial customers who, among other things, include a local cable television provider.
“It was happening way too often, several times a week that we’d have to go somewhere and just mess with that unit,” said Steve Melhorn, UnwiredOnline’s owner-operator. “With iBoot, most of the time other than getting a report that it happened, we don’t even have to do anything. If (the unit) stops or is unable to reach anything, it sets itself … and it’s back up and running in less than a minute and nobody hardly even notices it was down.”
For UnwiredOnline the $275-per-unit cost for an iBoot is immediately paid off in saved truck rolls. For Dataprobe, selling that few units for that little money is a way to make a living, said David Weiss, the company’s CEO.
“Why are we bothering?” Weiss parroted. “Every customer is important and one thing leads to another. This particular obligation isn’t shaking the earth or changing our world, but all of these things add up. There are many companies like UnwiredOnline that can benefit from this type of money-saving service product.”
And many more coming into the space all the time as Wi-Fi and WiMAX expand the way fixed broadband wireless works. The iBoot is a network-attached AC power switch with automated monitoring and reboot capabilities.
“It’s Web browser-controlled so that any service personnel can attach to it, open a Web page, click on/off or reboot and not have to roll a truck,” Weiss said.
UnwiredOnline uses the “auto-ping” technique to ping an IP address and, when that address is unresponsive, perform a reprogram power function or reboot.
“It’s a pretty straightforward product. This is not rocket science,” Weiss said.
It’s also a very necessary product for a company like UnwiredOnline that’s actually competing with two other wireless players for online subscribers in an area that’s typically too remote for wireline infrastructure, said Melhorn.
“We chose to go with wireless rather than any other method because we had the ability to cover a much bigger area,” he said. “We started out with one tower in the middle of town … and as we continue to grow we’ve gone to different devices, different equipment that works better.”
UnwiredOnline is typical of the rural wireless space. It uses 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum downstream and 5.8 GHz up and is pushing signals out as far as 21 miles. The average subscriber pays $45 for a basic package that delivers 500 Kbps of data speeds; a commercial customer – UnwiredOnline has one with 250 users and another with 120 – pays $145 for a package with multiple computer connections, 24x7 support and website hosting, as well as a little more guaranteed bandwidth.
Junction City, a town of about 3,000 people noted for building motor homes, helped UnwiredOnline get started and is now one of the ISP’s customers, Melhorn said.
The company, he concluded, is not standing still but is “keeping our eye on WiMAX” but isn’t in any rush to standardize on the new fixed broadband specifications. “It would mean changing out all of our CPE units which would be astronomical. Probably at some point in the game we will put in a tower that will be WiMAX and we’ll proceed with it that way.”
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