Backbone Directory: Etheric Networks

The Bay Area WISP works with other ISPs on a reseller and a wholesale basis, and is also eyeing partnership opportunities worldwide.

by Jeff Goldman [September 19, 2006]

W. Alexander Hagen founded Etheric Networks in 1999 while working in wireless systems research and development at NTT DoCoMo. The company now offers a wide range of wireless broadband service plans to business and residential customers throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

"It's grown pretty quickly—people are really happy with the speeds," Hagen says. "And what we've tried to do here in the Silicon Valley is give people unfettered access: we try to never firewall any ports except in an emergency."

Hagen says service to the community is a key focus for the company. "At one point when we had spent a lot of money building out the southern network into the Santa Cruz area, some people told us they didn't have to send their kids to daycare any more because they could telecommute from home," Hagen says. "You drive home and you think to yourself, well, no matter what happens, we made a real impact on people's lives. You wouldn't think providing high speed Internet would necessarily do that, but it does."

Etheric works with other ISPs both on a reseller model and on a wholesale basis. "We're connected right now at Equinix, so we have some cross-connects there to other providers who can then make use of this network to bypass the telco and get directly to the client," Hagen says. "We're also homed at Qwest."

Redundancy and physical robustness, Hagen says, are core strengths of the network. "This last winter was the greatest storm that's happened in California in the last 100 years," he says. "We had incredible winds: 100, 120 miles an hour. It was a humbling experience, because we were exposed to the most grueling punishment I've ever seen. Most of our systems survived, but we did have one tower blow, and blow bad, for about 12 hours."

In the future, Hagen says, rather than expanding Etheric's network into nearby areas of California, the plan is to market the company's network platform and system architecture to other providers. "The hope is that this hardware and software platform that we're building will be solid enough that we will partner and license with other operators—and we do have some VCs who are clients of ours that are quite supportive about this," he says.

Hagen says those kinds of opportunities may well be strongest not within the United States, but in Africa, South America and Asia. "My team and my own personal background are very international, so we have some advantages over some of the other guys who we're competing against who are focused on the football stadium cities of the United States," he says.

Still, that doesn't mean in any way that Hagen's giving up on the U.S. "Here in the Bay Area alone, there's about $30 billion worth of digital communications going on annually—so there's an enormous amount of penetration still left to be done," he says.

Partial coverage list (all cities in Northern California):

Alviso	Foster City	Portola Valley
Aptos	Freedom	Redwood City
Aromas	Fremont	San Jose
Atherton	Gilroy	San Martin
Belmont	Hayward	San Mateo
Burlingame (parts)	Hillsborough	Santa Cruz
Ben Lomand	La Honda	Santa Clara
Berryessa	Los Altos	Saratoga
Boulder Creek (parts)	Los Gatos	Scotts Valley
Campbell	Millbrae	Soquel
Capitola	Milpitas	South San Francisco
Corralitos	Mountain View	Sunnyvale
Cupertino	Morgan Hill	Watsonville
Elkhorn	Oakland (parts)	Woodside
Felton	Palo Alto

Corporate Contact Info:

	Executive:	W. Alexander Hagen, CEO
	Headquarters:	990 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
	Customer Service and Support:	877-541-3905 x2
	Sales and Installations:	877-541-3905 x1 or sales@etheric.net
	Engineering:	network@etheric.net
	Customer Support Site:	http://www.etheric.net/support.html
	Coverage Map:	http://www.etheric.net/coverage.html
	Service Plans:	http://www.etheric.net/plans.html

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