Fixed Wireless Equipment

The WISP Box

A cantankerous self-described megalomaniac drops by our offices to describe the one appliance that every WISP needs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 18, 2006]

Dr. Simon Lok, founder and CTO of Lok Technology has an unusually impressive resume even for an internet era CEO. He worked at NASA's Goddard Institute at age 14. He worked as a consultant during the boom, and then founded the company. All of that, and he's not yet 30 years old.

He also taught at Columbia University in New York, where he developed his direct manner. Columbia allows students to post anonymous reviews of professors through its Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability (CULPA) system. The reviews of Dr. Lok are quite astonishing. He's proudest of this one:

This guy's completely insane. He constantly insults both the students and whatever else he happens to be talking about. Unlike a lot of the other professors in [Computer Science], he knows what he's talking about, so it's almost worth going to class.

"I realized I was better off being a megalomaniac entrepreneur than a professor," he jokes.

So, Mr. Lok, what does the technology do?
Meeting him at our offices, we ask him what makes the AIRLok distinctive. The box's services are services that WISPs are used to offering, from billing and authentication to usage statistics and firewall protection. The sales literature indicates that the key selling point is replacing five boxes with one.

In person, Lok is entertaining and precise rather than intimidating. He explains that the box offers cost savings and also allows WISPs to do things they could not do otherwise.

He says that the idea came to him while he was working as a consultant on Silicon Alley during the boom. "Everyone knew they were an internet company, so they all wanted two T-1s, dual homed, because you needed redundancy, and two Cisco routers. I tried to build my own Cisco router and realized that the margin on these boxes was high. And as to the Cisco CLI. Have you used it? It's like, 'shoot me now!' I had an epiphany about being able to build the platform, and we learned more over the years."

The cost savings of having everything in one box are obvious, he says. He points out that when you write software to replace boxes that hand packet traffic from one to the other, in series, you often write the software to do the same. So one piece of software writes to memory and then the next piece of software reads from memory. This is sub-optimal.

Instead, Lok says, the software inside his boxes maximizes usage of the large caches onboard the CPUs and NPUs, making everything more efficient

Lok says that Lok Technology is the only company designing equipment specifically for WISPs. Other products being sold to WISPs were designed for other users, he claims.

Efficiency gains are realized, Lok claims, in power use and speed, in space used by the box, and in the time and expense required to manage the box. He says the company has particular success in greenfield deployments, but that operators who know their costs find value in his company's products

"So, if you're managing Wi-Fi for 300 hotels," Lok explains, "you'll have three or four boxes in each. You'll have a Nomadix captive portal, a SonicWALL firewall, a billing system, and a router."

Or you could have a box from Lok Technology.

Modular and seamless
The product is based on OpenBSD and is modular. The core is a proprietary software platform, but the modules are open source. As a result, costs are relatively low.

Lok says that the company realizes further savings by using off the shelf hardware, including off the shelf NPUs, many of which are designed to work with the standards that govern the open source software the company uses. "Using off the shelf technology lowers costs. It's just like the way we are leveraging open source applications," he says.

Bundling the applications together, Lok Technology is able to make them interact. When billing and authentication talk to each other, new pricing models are possible. "We enable service providers to offer prepaid cards that deliver a different amount of bandwidth depending on the amount of money paid," notes Lok.

The interface is direct and simple (see image below).

The company allows ISPs to print coupons, each with a unique ID. The IDs can be output to a comma delimited file and printed on Avery labels using a Microsoft Word mail merge, notes Lok. Then they can be pasted into a local publication. He demos the software for us, setting each coupon to work for 86,400. "That's the number of seconds in a day," we asked, proud of the quick math.

"Yes," Lok responds, acknowledging the obvious.

The billing system in the box accepts PayPal and also works with authorize.net. Lok says that many startup ISPs are unable to get a merchant account and are eager to use PayPal.

He notes that the box allows WISPs to monitor users by bandwidth usage over a period of time. "You won't find this in boxes built for SMBs, because in a business, you can just walk over to the offender's desk and smack them on the head."

One final feature Lok talks about (there's plenty more, but this is a good overview) is the ability to manage multiple DSL lines at one location. You could bring in eight DSL lines to one location, and then use wireless to connect nearby towns that do not have DSL. Each adjacent town could use a different DSL line to connect to the internet, or you could segregate customers by bandwidth tier.

It's a nifty feature. We ask if the customers suggested it. "I'm not the smartest person in the world," says Lok, "just close to it."

"We're a customer driven company," he adds, more seriously.

A name change
The name of the company's product is changing today. Previously called the AirLok, the box is now called the LokBox. A press release, issued today, states:

"The Power of One" campaign . . . reemphasizes the company's unique ability to incorporate all necessary broadband provisioning, network management and control services into a single scalable and cost-effective device for Carrier, Hospitality, MDU/MTU, Metro/Municipality, Satellite, and WISP wireless and wireline deployments.

Pricing and availability
The LokBox is available now. Simone Rosa, director of marketing, notes that the product is available in a variety of different sizes for different markets.

Sample pricing at one distributor (chosen randomly) varies from $2,990 for an LokBox 318 supporting up to 100 concurrent sessions and 5,000 local user accounts to $24,990 for an LokBox 540 supporting 2,500 concurrent sessions and 1 million local user accounts.

—End