Backbone Directory: RapidDSL & Wireless

RapidDSL's wireless backbone provides coverage throughout Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

by Jeff Goldman [November 30, 2005]

RapidDSL & Wireless was founded in 1996, and now provides a variety of wireless backbone services to ISPs in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

The company's wireless network, which its calls the "Intairnet," uses a variety of frequencies between 900 MHz and 5.8 GHz to avoid interference in the various locations it serves.

According to company president Tom DeReggi, redundancy is ensured by the fact that every major point on the network is connected to at least two other sites. "We built it to not have to be reliable on any fiber network," he says. "There's too many outages where fiber was broken, or where one switch goes down and then the city goes down, so we felt it was important to build our own redundant network."

DeReggi says it was difficult to decide upon a business model for reselling wireless access to ISPs at first, since reselling wireless isn't like reselling other types of access. "If an ISP comes in and says, 'I want the full pipe,' that becomes very expensive, because the cost isn't the bandwidth—the cost is the roof right, and there's only so many places you can broadcast from," he says.

As a result, while DeReggi says that RapidDSL can offer speeds approaching those available over fiber, that's not the market they're targeting. Instead, the idea is to provide low-priced bandwidth at more moderate speeds. "Fiber's all about the backbone—what it costs to hand your data off to someone else—and in our business, it's about the front end—how much front end capacity there is," he says.

Three business models
ISPs can work with RapidDSL on a wholesale basis, as a partnership, or as an agent. For an ISP purchasing wholesale bandwidth, DeReggi says, one of the greatest benefits is the speed of deployment. "You don't have to wait five months to get your fiber pulled," he says. "You can get the deal done, get the bandwidth right away, and start making money today."

DeReggi says most ISPs prefer, though, to work with the company through a partnership rather than simply buying bandwidth wholesale. "We've found that we do much better as a co-branded product where we aren't in the background—it's up front that we're providing the backbone," he says. "It's just like Covad—if there's an ISP that sells Covad, it's clear that Covad is a CLEC and there's an ISP on top of it."

The point, DeReggi says, is that as RapidDSL gets more recognition for reliability, it's easier for a small ISP to co-brand with RapidDSL than it is for that ISP to try to acquire new customers alone. "They now have the brand recognition, and there's a fixed cost that they can count on for building their business model around," he says.

The third option is a pure agent relationship, where the ISP simply sells RapidDSL's service and receives a commission. That option, DeReggi says, has proved the most successful. "We're finding that having people be an agent of our company is more advantageous for everyone involved," he says. "Everyone makes more money that way, and there's less competition."

Building on a larger scale
The availability of the three different business models, DeReggi says, ensures that any ISP can find what they need—which is particularly important for a wireless provider like RapidDSL. "What we don't want is for someone to go and build a network side-by-side with us and just interfere with us—there's just not enough spectrum," he says.

In the long run, DeReggi says he hopes more WISPs will consider providing this kind of wholesale or agent offering. "What the WISP industry needs is for WISPs to be looked at as Tier 1 providers, not Tier 2 or 3 providers, where we're creating our own networks and our own interconnections," he says. "Wireless is no longer just about the last mile."

As an example, DeReggi says RapidDSL recently made an agreement with Baltimore's Believe Wireless to set up a low-cost interconnection between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. "Why should I go build in Baltimore if we could just interconnect?" he asks. "Those things make sense—and those kinds of interconnections are going to start happening on a much larger scale."

Corporate Contact Info:

	Executive:	Tom DeReggi, President
	Headquarters:	20205 Laurel Hill Way, Germantown, MD 20874
	Voice:	301-515-7774
	Fax:	301-515-7773
	Web Contact Form:	http://rapiddsl.com/requestinfo.cfm
	Sales:	sales@rapiddsl.net
	Information:	info@rapiddsl.net
	Technical Support:	tech@rapiddsl.net

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