Sparkplug CEO Dishes on Wireless Broadband Expansion, Differentiation

XC: Why did Sparkplug elect to build its own network as opposed to ride on someone else’s?

Malloy: It was really quality and control, and the economics. If you look at where businesses are today, we saw the opportunity where, if you can get service, sometimes it’s cost-prohibitive, particularly in a growth mode against the broadband needs. So we said, ‘How do you build a network fully diverse that can serve those customers from the get-go, at 30-50 percent of the cost less than what they pay the incumbents, and at the same time, has the ability to grow?’ And always being fans of wireless, and then seeing in 2002-2003 what would happen with IP-based technology at the radio, as we call it, we just saw it as the most efficient way to build that kind of network and control it end-to-end for the customer, which I think is very important. We were of the mind that the last thing to do is overcomplicate things by providing a network we didn’t control, or that we resold, or that had areas where you were on our network or off our network. It starts to diminish all the advantages of a completely diverse network.

XC: Who are key equipment suppliers and why?

Malloy: Our top three are DragonWave, Alvarion and Motorola. The reason we use them is they all have great product breadth and depth. They’re all time-proven. Early on, some of the deepest research we did before we even launched commercial service was spending time with the manufacturers, spending time in their labs, literally understanding what their product plans were. So in the case of Motorola, they have very durable equipment that holds up under all the stresses of weather. You name it and it just runs marvelously. It does a great job in terms of ability to give us management to the device – Motorola is the baseline infrastructure for service in a lot of areas.

We use Alvarion for the higher-megabit service in the areas as far as how their radios perform, and DragonWave we use predominantly for what we call our backhaul to connect our sites, as well as backbone for our networks. In many cases, we’ll use it for customer premises equipment if it’s a large installation from end-to-end for a customer. They’re all leading manufacturers with high-quality equipment; they have devices that we use to develop network management and monitoring schemes so that we can really control the quality of service for our customers; and they’re all IP-based.

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