Cutting the cord

Robert Lehki lives in a quiet subdivision about 10 miles south of downtown Spokane, just west of Highway 195. Like many other residents living outside the city limits, Lehki has hungered for high-speed Internet access.
No cable company serves his neighborhood, so a cable modem is out. Since moving there four years ago, he also has “called the phone company every other month, asking when they’d bring DSL out here,” Lehki said.
An emergency room doctor at Sacred Heart Medical Center, Lehki manages his bank account online, tracks investments and gathers news from Web sites. His dial-up modem service was so slow that he even tried satellite-based Internet.
“It was way too expensive and not very fast,” Lehki said.
Lehki finally got his wish two weeks ago when his home was outfitted with fixed-wireless Internet access provided by Air-Pipe, a Spokane company offering broadband connections to homes and businesses. The company has been in business for more than two years, but Lehki only discovered it after a neighbor got a similar account.
The approximately 20 companies like Air-Pipe that provide wireless Internet access to customers around Spokane and North Idaho hear the same story every week.
“We’re always getting people saying to us, ‘Where have you been the past two years?’” said Chuck Myers, president of Spokane-based Wind Wireless Inc., another wireless Internet service provider, or WISP.
“We say, ‘We’ve been here. You just didn’t know about us.’ “
Instead of waiting for customers to find them, the area’s growing list of WISPs have become far more aggressive about finding customers who will pay between $25 and $80 a month for fast wireless Internet service. They have targeted the increasing numbers of rural or suburban residents who can’t get cable or DSL service.
“That group (of customers) is the center of our marketing plans,” said Jim Wilson, president of Liberty Lake-based Ptera Wireless Internet.
Industry figures estimate that about 90 percent of Spokane County residents have the option of getting high-speed Internet service from their cable TV provider. Qwest, the Denver-based telecommunications company, couldn’t provide figures on how many homes and businesses have the option of getting DSL through their phone lines, but said the service has grown steadily. Frequently, however, neither of those options is available to people who live in outlying areas.
The WISPs are trying to reach customers like Colleen and John Barnes, Spokane Valley residents who are buying a home near Mount Spokane.
“We won’t buy that house unless it has wireless Internet,” Colleen Barnes said. The 33-year-old mother works from home, providing medical billing for a Spokane company. They found that the home they want to buy can receive wireless service from a hilltop tower about eight miles to the south.
Unlike cable systems that rely on land-based wires, wireless providers send data from one point to another using radio-frequency transmissions. And unlike cell-phone companies, wireless Internet providers, at least for now, are operating in unlicensed frequencies. That means there are no government controls over how signals are managed.
Competition among wireless providers for rural and suburban customers has turned the airwaves around the Inland Northwest into a battlefield of competing signals.
“We had pretty good overall conditions a few years ago,” said Chris George, president of Spokane-based Internet provider Choicenet. But the company is choosing to gradually leave the WISP market, George said.
“We just couldn’t guarantee quality of service anymore,” he said.
The business community, in particular, needs reliable and secure data delivery, George said. The security of wireless data can be guaranteed by companies that properly build in encryption for customers, he said. But there’s not much companies can do when customers can’t be assured of high quality data delivery due to signal interference from other wireless networks.
George plans to help find alternative providers for his customers, adding that Choicenet expects to find new wireless customers, but only outside Spokane.
Meanwhile, he’s already seen some consolidation occurring among wireless Internet providers in the area. The area’s larger, more successful companies have taken over smaller operators, he said.
During the past two years, for instance, Pass Word, Inc., of Spokane, acquired two smaller WISPs, said company President Rod Bacon. For more than 30 years Pass Word concentrated on providing mobile radio and pager services. It’s now aggressively looking to build its wireless data business, Bacon said.
In the past year Liberty Lake-based Ptera Wireless Internet acquired the wireless customers of Icehouse, a Spokane Internet service provider. And two years ago Wind Wireless acquired Arias.Net, a Spokane WISP.
Several other WISPs, like Tsunami, have simply gone out of business.
The WISP competition here includes companies jostling for the best placement of antennas on high ground between the West Plains and North Idaho.
“This is an ideal area for wireless,” says Bill Geibel Jr., president of Air-Pipe. “It’s got high mountaintops that look down on populous valley floors.”
Myers said Wind Wireless is attracting customers by creating what he claims is the world’s largest free wireless “hot spot.” The company’s area of coverage is essentially all of Spokane, he added, from downtown to the state line and from Painted Hills north toward Pend Oreille County — about 750 square miles. Customers can browse the Web on the free zone, but can’t send e-mail or download files.
The company is adding about five to seven new customers per week, Myers noted, “and some find out about us through the hot zone we have.”
While competition is fierce, the tone between local firms is cooperative.
If the wireless signals of one company are interfering with another channel used by another company, the problem goes two ways, said Wilson, of Ptera Wireless.
“We talk to each other and make sure we find ways to adjust the channels or change the direction of the towers slightly,” Wilson said.
The bigger challenge, noted Geibel, is the looming threat of outside corporations eventually marching into Spokane and knocking off local firms. Companies like Clearwire, launched by Seattle-area cellular kingpin Craig McCaw, have started developing wireless networks for big metropolitan areas.
“We know,” Geibel said, “that we need to work together (to resolve problems) so that we don’t get taken over by the bigger guys like McCaw.”
That hasn’t stopped companies from taking steps to jump into areas where they haven’t competed before. Geibel is raising investor funds to expand into North Idaho. Coeur d’Alene-based Intermax Wireless has about 300 customers, most of them in Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint. Mike Morris, an engineer for the company, said it is “making plans to bring in more of our service to the Spokane and Eastern Washington area.”
Morris, who spent about 10 years working with early Internet service providers in the dial-up era, said he foresees an eventual contraction in the number of WISPs serving Spokane and North Idaho.
“There will be reductions as the technology evolves, just like it did with area dial-up providers,” Morris said. “But there’s still plenty of customers we haven’t all reached. There’s still room for growth here.”