With over 12,000 POPs nationwide, Brand X works with its customers to find the coverage and pricing that's right for them.

by Jeff Goldman [August 17, 2005]

Brand X Networks was originally formed in November 2001 to initiate the buyout of ProtoSource Corporation's ISP assets. In May of 2002, the two companies signed a purchase agreement. Brand X then took over ProtoSource's ISP operations and began offering wholesale dialup, turnkey VISP services, and outsourced technical support.

According to John Prather, Brand X's CEO, the takeover represented a significant shift for the company and its customers. "ProtoSource had focused primarily on Web development and on their retail ISP brand," he says. "Even though they had acquired Micro-Net, with their wholesale business, they didn't really focus on it for the two or three years that they were operating it."

Brand X Networks (866) 487-3244 sales@brandxnet.com

When Brand X took over, the company focused specifically on the VISP offering. "The name 'Brand X' implies that our brand doesn't matter—it's our customer's brand that's important," Prather says. "Our logo has a picture of a man we call the 'X Man,' holding up the word 'Brand'—because we want to hold up our customer's brand."

Lately, Prather says, Brand X has focused on providing outsourced technical support, but the company does also offer a complete turnkey VISP service, as well as a number of different standalone offerings—including wholesale dialup.

The dialup offering
Brand X's more than 12,000 POPs are provided through arrangements with StarNet (now owned by US LEC), XO, Level 3, O1, GlobalPOPs, WISPNET, and ISDN-Net—as well as 10 POPs owned by Brand X itself.

An ISP's customers can use the same login throughout Brand X's network—which Prather sees as a key differentiator for the company. "We've seen a lot of dialup providers that have different login conventions for different networks, and that adds to the confusion for the end user," he says. "It also adds to the support burden if you get, say, somebody that travels and needs to use dialup in different areas. We wanted to keep it consistent so that from the end user's perspective, it's just one big network."

The company also maintains a dynamic POP list to help ISPs give their customers the latest information on dialup locations. "We give a piece of code to our customers which they can put in their Web site," Prather says. "When the POP list comes up, it only shows the POPs that provider has—and it's dynamic: when we get an update from, say, Level 3 that they added some POPs, we add it to our list and it automatically populates the POP lists of the provides that get that POP."

A customized POP list is created for each ISP client, in order to give the ISP the coverage they need. As a result, Prather says, the pricing for the offering is intentionally flexible. "Different ISPs have radically different needs—and we want to be able to meet everyone's needs," he says.

If an ISP wants to keep its prices as low as possible, Prather says the coverage can be minimized in order to keep wholesale prices as low as $3 or $4—or, for ISPs that want thorough coverage (or coverage in remote areas), prices can reach $7.50 or $8 per user. Most of the company's pricing, Prather says, is done on a per-user basis, though some clients choose hourly pricing instead.

Most contracts, Prather says, are limited to a 50-hour average across the entire user base. Limiting based on average use across the user base (rather than a hard cap), he says, is a much more customer-friendly way to maintain control of bandwidth usage. "You don't want to lose a customer just by interrupting their service—from their perspective—arbitrarily," he says.

Expanding into wireless
Rural areas in general, Prather says, tend to be the best markets for the company's services. "Those areas are having a tough time getting any kind of broadband, so what we we're seeing is that there's still some growth in dialup there," he says. "In the Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, dialup is generally flat for most of our ISPs, unless they're aggressively marketing and they have a low-priced offering."

Another significant client base for Brand X, Prather says, is the ISP owner who's in the process of selling his business. "Either they can't find a buyer, or they don't think they're getting what their company is worth—so instead of selling at a lower price, they turnkey the service," he says. "It's almost a parking place, where they can trust us to take care of their user base. They don't have to worry about those customers going away while they're trying to sell them."

Prather says Brand X bought a nearby wireless ISP a few months ago in order to begin to understand the wireless market. "We are probably going to be expanding into wireless aggressively, trying to build a national network of wireless providers—essentially, the equivalent of wholesale wireless aggregation—so that somebody could build a national wireless offering without having to build a national network," he says.

The company is also working with its partners to set up SlipStream caching servers as close to the end user as possible, in order to improve the performance of its dialup accelerator offering. "Our hope is that by working with the dialup backbones themselves and dynamically forwarding the end user to the closest accelerator server, it'll make a noticeable difference," Prather says.

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