Electro-Comm provides wireless equipment and advice for everyone from small startups to WISPs with thousands of subscribers.

by Jeff Goldman [September 6, 2006]

Electro-Comm Distributing was founded in 1976 as a manufacturer's rep in the electronics business, and soon became a wireless distributor. Since then, according to company president Mike Brownson, Electro-Comm has simply followed the wireless market wherever it's led. "That's part of the trick in any technology field: watching for the changes that are on the horizon, figuring out which ones you want to address, and positioning yourself to be there," he says.

In the '70s, Brownson says, that meant two-way radios—and later, cellular. "At one time, cellular was about a third of our business," he says. "As it became too heavily consumer-ized, it no longer was really suitable for what we do, so ultimately we dropped that. At about that same time, we saw the broadband market starting to take off: it was just a glimmer on the horizon."

Electro-Comm Distributing 5015 Paris St, Denver, CO 80239 Voice: (303) 371-8182 mailto: sales@electro-comm.com

For the move to wireless broadband, Brownson says Electro-Comm's RF background served it well. "At that stage, a lot of the folks in the broadband wireless access business understood networking, but they didn't understand RF," he says. "So we filled in that piece of wireless knowledge and helped them understand fade margins and fresnel zones and antenna patterns and all those sorts of things. We still find a lot of our customers are very IP-savvy but not wireless-savvy, so it's been a really good mix."

Brownson says the ability to provide that kind of advice has been key to Electro-Comm's success. "The level of handholding that we provide on just helping people through their challenges has made a huge difference," he says.

Equipment guidance
Electro-Comm serves a wide variety of clients in addition to WISPs, including federal, state and local governments—and comprising companies of all sizes. "We still get many calls a week from folks that are looking to enter the business," he says. "Perhaps they just want to share a DSL line: some of it is that small—clear up to, our biggest customer has got 10,000 wireless subscribers."

It's the smaller providers, Brownson says, that generally need the most help in choosing the right product for their needs. "That's one of the areas we've found we've been able to provide a great deal of value on, because we have a wide variety of wireless platforms suitable for WISPs."

The idea is that anyone who calls Electro-Comm for product advice is going to get a much more objective response on the pros and cons of various platforms than they would if they were to call the vendors directly.

"We've got the Motorola Canopy, we've got SmartBridges, we have Tranzeo, we have Engenius and Inscape Data—they all have a slightly different placement in terms of how they fit in the marketplace, in terms of the capabilities and their performance and price points," Brownson says.

The best solution for a very small ISP that's just starting to explore wireless, Brownson says, is going to be different from the best solution for a business that simply wants the most proven system available. "For the guy that's looking for a stable, reliable platform to create a viable business that has value and that he can sell off, it's been shown that wireless ISPs that have deployed with Motorola Canopy solutions tend to get about a 25 percent premium per POP over a kluged solution," he says.

Key differentiators
Browson says there are enough competitors in the wireless equipment distributor marketplace that the guidance Electro-Comm offers its clients is much more of a differentiator than price could ever be. "Our goal is to simply remain competitive: I see no advantage in being the low price leader," he says. "Our basic tenet here is 'fast, friendly, easy to do business with, and knowledgeable.'"

Among those differentiators, Brownson says, 'fast' is key. "If someone needs some product, they generally want it as fast as possible," he says. "So we respond quickly and they get their order quickly, because we have a large amount of inventory and we have a very efficient system. We've been distributing for 30 years now, so we've really got it honed down so that it's a very clean, effective and efficient system. Generally, from phone call to box on the dock is often just a couple of hours."

And Brownson says the same focus on efficiency is applied to returns. "Some of our competitors are so concerned about making sure that the i's are dotted and the t's crossed that they make their customers jump through hoops," he says. "I personally would rather handle an RMA or a defective product from a customer that we never sold it to in the first place, but make that experience easy for the customer, so that perhaps the next time he's looking to purchase product, he will remember that."

The result of all of those efforts, Brownson says, is—ideally—good word of mouth. "By far, that's how most of our customers find us," he says. "If you treat all of your customers with respect and integrity, and you provide all of the core values that we hold in our business, they do your advertising for you."

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