news

Texas company airBand begins Net services in area
Peter Key
Staff Writer
Philadelphia.bizjournals.com
September 9 - 15, 2005

A Dallas company that uses fixed wireless technology to provide high-speed Internet access and voice over Internet protocol phone service to business customers has entered the Philadelphia market.

"We're already in the Northeast (United States), and we want to start branching out from Baltimore," said Mark F. Spagnolo, airBand Communications Inc.'s president and CEO.

airBand was founded in 2000. It initially planned to offer its services nationwide, but the telecom bust forced it to curtail its plans, so it concentrated on three markets: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Phoenix. The privately held company says it is profitable in all three, although it won't release income or revenue figures.

This spring, airBand decided the telecommunications industry had changed enough to support expansion and it acquired Accelacom of Baltimore, a fixed wireless company, for an undisclosed sum.

Last month, airBand appointed Spagnolo to lead the company's expansion. His prior experience includes stints as head of Broadwing Communications, a telecom firm based in Austin, Texas, and UUNet Technologies Inc., a Fairfax, VA., company that was the nation's first Internet service provider.

airBand is looking at entering other markets besides Philadelphia and expanding in markets it's already in. The company looks for markets that have a lot of the midsize businesses that are its typical target customers, geography that makes using fixed wireless technology feasible and available locations for its base stations.

If there's already a fixed wireless provider in a market airBand wants to enter, it will consider buying that company as it did with Accelacom in Baltimore. Otherwise, it will expand into the market, as it did in Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, airBand's base station on top of Loews Philadelphia Hotel enables it to service customers within about a five-mile radius of the building.

The base station provides wireless connectivity to dishes that airBand sets up on its customers' rooftops. Feeds from dishes connect to the customers' desktop computers and phones.

"The service is rock solid, which I didn't expect it to be," said Ben Levin, the practice administrator for 9th Street Internal Medicine Associates, a Center City medical practice that signed up with airBand at the end of June, the same month airBand began providing service in Philadelphia.

One thing Levin particularly likes about airBand is it ability to change the amount of bandwidth allocated to a customer depending on the customer's needs.

For instance, 9th Street Internal Medicine will be converting its records to a digital format and will need a lot of bandwidth to transmit the newly created digital files to the computer they will be stored on. After it completes the conversion, its bandwidth needs will shrink again.

Temporarily increasing the amount of bandwidth allocated to a customer is problematic, at best, for traditional telecommunications companies. airBand can do it in 30 minutes.

We just turn a dial and dial in more bandwidth for the customer if they need it," said Lisa Kolczun, the company's vice president of marketing.