With experience in the ISP industry going back to the mid-'80s, SkyComm provides a reliable nationwide footprint at an affordable price.

by Jeff Goldman [July 14, 2004]

SkyComm Incorporated was founded last year as a subsidiary of RIVA.NET, an ISP founded back in 1985 and based just outside of Annapolis, Maryland. "We're a bunch of old government and defense contractors, going back to the seventies," says Randall Pigott, the company's CEO.

RIVA.NET does extensive government contracting work in addition to its retail services. "We're wholly self-financed," Pigott says. "We have no long term debt. We haven't had to take venture capital over the years—we grew organically. Our government contract base really gives us an enviable position compared to other companies who are out there having to exist on credit."

SkyComm (800) 956-0502

In addition to its financial stability, Pigott says the company's broad coverage is a strong selling point. "We have a phone book of well over 50,000 local numbers in all 50 U.S. states, D.C., and now Canada," he says. "We've got some of the lowest contract costs in the industry through our suppliers, through over 90 different CLECs and ILECs."

Two levels of service are available, standard and enhanced. The enhanced network provides a login to every number SkyComm offers; the more economical standard network provides less comprehensive access.

Flexible formats
Wholesale dialup is available in a number of formats, including a variety of different per-user, per-hour, and per-port options. "We've got four different types of per-port," Pigott says. "Three of them are dial, and the other one's dedicated. We can sell traditional hard-limited ports that most of the other providers will sell. We also sell hard-limited burstable, which is a hybrid product, and then fully burstable."

Base pricing for all products is listed on SkyComm's web site. "It doesn't go any higher than those prices, and we do go down significantly," Pigott says. "We closed a deal for $2.50 per user the other day. Yes, it was 30,000 users, but still, that's a lot lower than anybody that they talked to was willing to go."

SkyComm's online interface gives its clients access to a wide variety of information. "You can see reports and charts about your usage if you're hours-based," Pigott says. "If you're per-user, you can see the users, sort them by the number of hours each one has used, look at your aggregate, and even drill down to the individual session level and look at a user's sessions throughout the month."

For new clients, the setup process is extremely efficient. "Somebody can call us up and say, 'I want service,' and if they're approved for credit already because they're D&B or they do a wire transfer, ten minutes later they're set up with service," Pigott says. "They're working across our whole network of over 50,000 numbers—we create the realm here and it just starts working."

The company's services, Pigott adds, are appropriate for ISPs of all sizes. "We can give a guy with ten users service, and we do," he says. "We have the whole range. The automation in our back room lets us provision somebody with as little as 20 or 50 or 100 users, and they get service just as well as the big guys. With the back room we have, they can do everything themselves: they can manage their own users."

Stable and consistent
Keith Dornbusch is CTO of US Choice an ISP based in Tomball, Texas that offers everything from dialup to satellite. A few years ago, Dornbusch began looking for a wholesale dialup provider to give the company a national footprint. US Choice worked with a few other providers before settling on SkyComm last year.

With other providers, Dornbusch says, support issues were the biggest problem. "We would get bad packets, we would get dropped packets, we would get a situation where we'd call them up with a problem and lot of times we were told that it wasn't their problem—it was our problem," he says. "From day one, though, when we did testing with SkyComm, we found that things were very consistent."

Dornbusch says that SkyComm's stability has been ideal. "We probably receive two to three calls a day, if that, for support issues on dialup," he says. "As a matter of fact, we laid off a couple of people that were doing support desk help on dialup, because we just didn't need them any more. So it worked out very well for us."

A variety of services
US Choice works with SkyComm for a variety of different services. "We do port purchases for dedicated ISDN, we do per-port on some dialup in some regions, and we do per-user on some dialup," Dornbusch says. "So we've got several things going with them. They're one of the few ISPs that can offer us things like dedicated ports for ISDN—there aren't too many dialup networks that can do that."

The company also provides VISP services through SkyComm, which Dornbusch says is very easy to do. "We really don't have to do a lot, because we can turn over an individual login to their realm on the SkyComm back room, and they can get all the reporting and everything else they want directly," he says. "They don't have to call us."

Finally, Dornbusch says, SkyComm's back room is a great asset. "It's very accurate for reporting usage," he says. "They've got charting that shows user volume activity, which is very helpful to us. And they're working on some reports to help the ISP better analyze his own market—we can see where our peak usage is, in what area codes, which is very beneficial to us from a marketing standpoint."

— End

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	[March 16, 2001]	Va-Va-VISP
	[Nov. 27, 2000]	How to Pick A Wholesale Access Provider

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory