Wavepath: Where Wires Can't Go
By Yvonne Lee
When Bob Swaney moved his Berkeley Telecommunications data warehousing consulting firm's servers to his new property in Woodside, CA, he knew its remote location would prevent the company from using DSL, and the local telephone company would not bring out the wiring for ISDN.
"We needed a nice fast connection and accessibility all the time," he says. Cable modems also were unavailable, and he wasn't sure cable would have been fast enough to run the client demos on the company intranet, anyway.
Through a series of connections, he stumbled upon an ISP that could provide reliable Internet access in an instant: using microwaves!
Concentric Connection
Through an association with a beta test site, Swaney learned about Concentric Network offering its wireless service, iSpeed ConcentricWireless, to customers for $150 per month. The service includes unlimited Internet connectivity, domain name services, and the required number of IP addresses. Concentric, which also offers DSL, virtual private networks (VPN), Web hosting, and e-commerce services, provides the service through a company called Wavepath.
In addition to Concentric, Wavepath offers its wireless service through seven other San Francisco Bay Area ISPs: Slip.Net, LanMinds, IJNT, Bay Junction Technologies, MasterLink, NetGate, and Grendlenet. The ISPs say they are no longer promoting Wavepath's wireless service, but Concentric officials say the company will proactively sell it to customers who need high-speed Internet access, but are unable to use DSL.
