Fixed Wireless Equipment

From Chaska to The Alamo

This hotspot solution provider is interested in deployments large and small, anywhere in the world.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 2, 2005]

It's not every day a company that we've known about for years calls us up to explain exactly what they do, but Pleasanton, Calif.-based Pronto Networks has a complex offering for WISPs and we were glad to take the call.

"We manage WISP networks, applications, revenues, and services," said Carol Highton, Pronto's vice president and general manager of the American Region. Yes, that means she's in charge of all business between the North Pole and the South one on this continent. Pronto has WISP customers throughout the Americas, though the majority are in North America.

Pronto has a strong presence in the hospitality (hotel) and retail (coffee shop, etc.) business verticals. Highton told us that the most recent conference she attended was run by Choice Hotels International to help franchisers catch up on the latest service offerings.

"We can do the billing, generally through credit card. We also integrate into hospitality management systems, such as Fidelio." Fidelio software is by Columbia, Md.-based MICROS.

The company has a complete billing system, hotspot management system (including the Inspira appliance for managing up to 100 hotspots), and even offers 24 x 7 outsourced tech support for its customers. The only thing the company doesn't do is point to point fixed wireless.

Highton said that Pronto has helped WISPs do billing, marketing, and other things as well. She noted that Pronto's 60 engineers, based in Pleasanton and Bangalore, can build custom add-ons, responding to any challenge. For example, the company can now bill on almost any metric a WISP could think of charging for (bandwidth, time, flat fee, etc.).

For large projects, Pronto will work with companies like Nortel Networks. It bid on the Philadelphia project with AT&T and Lucent. For the city of Chaska, it partnered with Tropos.

For smaller projects, like the Alamo, the company can put together the appropriate parterships as well. For the Alamo, the company worked with Hotzone Integrators, equipment provider BelAir Networks, and competitor NAS Wireless to enable local WISP SA Unwired.net to complete the project.

Pricing and availability
The Pronto managed solution starts at $2 per user per month for WISPs. Tech support is extra. A revenue share, making it easier to start out, is available.

The future
Highton said the company is working on a variety of features that WISPs are interested in. She said the company is looking at QoS and prioritizing packets not just for VoIP, but also for retail venues, where credit card verification and other enterprise applications may have requirements for optimal performance.

She said the company is also very interested in WiMAX.

She added that the engineers are always interested in new ideas. "We like to be able to say, 'challenge us!'"

—End