O1 focuses on the state of California, with straightforward support, reliable service … and free candy!

by Jeff Goldman [October 19, 2005]

O1 Communications was founded back in 1998, offering what was then a new way to outsource dialup access. "At the time, there were just a limited number of companies offering dial access—and they were primarily doing it through Class 4, Class 5 switches, and delivering PRIs out to the ISPs, and the ISPs would hang their modem banks there," says company Senior Vice President Max Seely.

O1 Communications Voice: (888) 444-1111 info@o1.com

Instead, Seely says, O1 designed its network with a managed modem concept in mind. "It was a little bit of an obstacle to get over—people like to go by and touch their own equipment, look at it once in a while," he says. "But once we proved the concept that you don't have to fight with the telcos, you don't have to worry about sending somebody out in the middle of the night to go reset some modems down in Bakersfield, or put somebody on a plane and send them here to install some new modem chassis, people started liking the idea of managed modems."

To help allay ISPs' fears about losing control, Seely says, O1 built a suite of web-based tools to help them keep an eye on all aspects of the service as needed. "And it's just been a good ride ever since," he says.

A new era
The ISP business has of course changed dramatically since O1's founding, and Seely says the company is now focused on helping ISPs access every possible source of income. "Our biggest challenge is to stay wise with the market and identify any and all incremental revenue that we can pass on to them," he says.

One such source of revenue is the company's wholesale VoIP offering. While VoIP might not seem to make much sense to a dialup ISP, Seely says, it can serve as a way for that ISP to hold onto a customer who's decided to switch to broadband. The ISP may have lost that customer for dialup access, but "now they can supply him with telephone service," he says.

Whatever the service, Seely says, it's crucial to have a wide range of additional offerings. "A lot of the ISPs that were just there for the dialup and prepays and online accounts have kind of filtered out," he says. "They've either been acquired, or they've silently gone away."

Good ol' boys
O1's network covers the state of California, though the company also offers nationwide access through an agreement with Level 3. "We decided that we like what we do, and we have employees that like what they do," Seely says. "Why not sleep well at night, limit our growth, and supply a good service to the ISPs that we're dealing with?"

The company's key aim, Seely says, is to maintain direct and honest contact with customers. "If you will, we're the good ol' boys of the CLEC world," he says. "We do things on a handshake. We'll stay here till late at night to make something happen for somebody—and with that mentality, we want our ISPs to avail themselves of every opportunity that can create revenue: a good example is remote backup and retrieval, which we're announcing at ISPCON."

Still, Seely insists there's still a place in the market for a simple dialup offering. "There's a lot of people that just want to go on and check their e-mail and maybe do a little shopping, and that's it," he says. "Not everybody eats and breathes and sleeps the Internet like we do, thank God—so there are still a lot of people out there that dialup just serves their purpose."

Free candy
Art Coombes is General Manager of Internet Frontier, an ISP based in Walnut Creek, California, which has been using O1 exclusively for its dialup access for the past five years. Until they switched to O1, Coombes says, the ISP maintained their own lines. "The issue kept being keeping all the lines up, buying more modems—it was just a real nightmare," he says. "And when a company like O1 comes along and offers a wholesale modem pool at a very attractive and doable rate, we thought, 'This makes a lot of sense.'"

O1's support for its ISP customers, Coombes says, has been impressive. "We don't have a lot of occasion to call them, but once in a great while there will be a network problem or an outage—and typically, we'll see an e-mail almost before the customers are calling to inquire if there is an outage," he says.

And if you've got a sweet tooth, Coombes says, O1 is a perfect choice. "Every month, they send us a little box—and it comes Federal Express," he says. "Now, it's not a box that you'd get at Thanksgiving—it's a smaller box—but every month, the treat changes. It's be hard candy one month, it'll be M&Ms the next month, it'll be Jelly Bellies the next month."

While the candy's nice, Coombes says it really demonstrates the company's attention to detail. "It's a small thing, but it shows that there's somebody there that's paying attention to their customers," he says. "They do good work—their network is very reliable, they keep a sharp eye on it, their prices are very reasonable, and they're easy people to deal with."

— End

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	[April 30, 2003]	Wholesale Dialup Directory: DialupUSA
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Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory