Opinion: Azulstar could give EarthLink a run for the muni market
While EarthLink re-evaluates its position in the muni market, Azulstar is quietly upping the ante.While EarthLink re-evaluates its position in the muni market, Azulstar is quietly upping the ante.
Azulstar’s appointment of IBM’s muni wireless point man, Yorke Rhodes III, as its new CEO last month got lost in the headlines surrounding EarthLink’s announced re-evaluation. But don’t let its relegation to the back of the business section go unnoticed; Rhodes is out to shake up the market.
In press releases and interviews that were overshadowed by stories (often erroneous) that extolled EarthLink’s dilemma, Rhodes made no secret of his intention to give EarthLink a run for its money. In a press release issued at the time of his appointment, Rhodes was quoted as saying “After significant due diligence on the wireless operator space, Azulstar stands out as an organization with the right foundation, business model and industry partnerships to become the next nationwide wireless broadband player.”
In a subsequent interview he told the Western Michigan Business Review, “”We are looking at Azulstar as a viable, national broadband player that can be very easily propelled into the same echelon as companies like Earthlink.”
Rhodes has the experience to help Azulstar make that move. As a director of municipal wireless services at IBM, he helped forged the company’s vision of the muni market. You’ll recall that IBM is one of the corporate partners in Joint Venture Silicon Valley, the private-public coalition bringing wireless connectivity to the valley.
Before that, Rhodes was vice president of investment banking technology at Goldman Sachs where he led the company’s world-wide deployment of RIM Blackberry-based mobile e-mail. Prior to that, he served as a principal technology consultant on global wireless messaging design and deployment for Microsoft.
As I’ve said before, the mistake that many headline writers make is in making EarthLink the sole barometer of the market. In many ways, Azulstar and other smaller WISPs are more representative. Where EarthLink faces the challenge of what do to about its rapidly eroding base of dial-up customers, Azulstar (and other companies that are not saddled with converting customers from yesterday’s technologies) can focus its energies on the specific challenges of the deployments at hand.
That’s not to say those challenges are not without risks. In any new business such as muni wireless there will be missteps. Azulstar, in fact, profitted from one of them. In October, 2004, Azulstar took on Rio Rancho, New Mexico’s planned 103 square mile deployment after the job proved to be too much for the original vendor. In addition to Rio Rancho and its work with JVSVN, Azulstar deployed wireless networks in the Michigan communities of Grand Haven, Ferrysburg and SpringLake.
These cities are not nearly as large and their deployments are not nearly as sexy as the big city deployments that EarthLink pursues but they earned Azulstar a slot in VoIP magazine’s list of “top 20 companies to watch” last year. They are also evidence that there’s more to this market than what’s happening in San Francisco or Philadelphia.
(In the interest of disclosure, the answer is “no.” I do not own stock in Azulstar, nor do I own any interest in any wireless company.)–Carol Ellison
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