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Mar. 19--The AT&T Broadbands, Verizons and Comcasts of the world claim millions of customers and manage sprawling, complex national networks.
Then there's Kory Mohr.
Here's one guy with just one customer (so far).
But he's one determined businessman, bent on building a career out of a company he technically runs in his spare time after a full-time job.
And Mohr's broadband startup depends on a wireless technology that hardly got a chance to prove its worth before the technology slump of 2001 all but wiped it from the national playing field.
Meet Mr. Underdog, proud owner of Frontier Broadband LLC, a Richmond-based high-speed Net firm ready to show that fixed wireless technology has a future in Richmond and beyond.
"The whole thing just fascinates me," said Mohr, a 30-year-old Pennsylvania native who juggles his startup and his full-time job as a systems administrator for Capital One Financial Corp.
"I just see the value in it," he said. "I hear a lot of people grumbling about the quality of their Internet provider. It's not personalized."
Mohr used to grumble about his Internet connection, too. But it was more about what he couldn't get than about the quality of service.
As high-speed connections began showing up in metropolitan areas a few years back through cable modems and digital subscriber lines, Mohr was left out.
At the time, the cable television company didn't offer Internet service in his Henrico County neighborhood. His stretch of the street wasn't close enough to the right telephone company equipment to qualify for a DSL connection, either.
For a guy who has been hooked on the Internet since beholding the coolness that was early e-mail, this was not good.
So Mohr stewed. And he read a lot, eventually learning about this fixed-wireless option. It relied on a main antenna, mounted on a roof or tower, where it beamed wireless connections as fast or faster than cable or DSL to homes or businesses equipped with the right receiver.
Eventually, while on vacation at a North Carolina beach, Mohr's interest got the best of him. He would start a company.
"It is a dream to me," he confesses. "Financially, this could work. This could really be profitable."
The big telecom companies aren't so sure. Not about fixed wireless, anyway. For a variety of reasons, including the poor economy at the time, big players such as Sprint and AT&T shelved or dropped fixed-wireless projects last year.
Mohr was just getting started.
The business, however, has developed slowly. He and partner Mike Sowers had no luck finding early stage venture capital in a tough market, even though Frontier Broadband won one award for its business plan and some local recognition among the tech community.
More recently, Frontier leased an office in the city's downtown high-tech incubator, Advantech. The company has its first transmitting antenna on the building's roof.
Mohr Runs Frontier with a $35,000 small business loan. His first customer is a Richmond lawyer whose office is a few blocks away. (The technology requires a relatively clear line of sight between the antenna and the customer's receiving equipment.)
Like a lot of technology entrepreneurs, Mohr talks quickly and energetically about the technical details but shies away from much discussion about himself.
Not sure what direction to take out of high school, Mohr headed straight to the Navy. Computers seemed interesting, yet he studied at a Navy paralegal school. But it was networking the systems that most intrigued Mohr.
At Capital One, which supports his entrepreneurial efforts, Mohr maintains the company's Intranet-based conference room scheduling system and performs other computer systems duties.
He also squeezes in time to moderate a fixed-wireless discussion forum on DSLReports.com, a popular Web site devoted to broadband issues.
There, Mohr and other small, independent wireless companies share good times and bad. They carry on lengthy threads about evolving technology, about troubleshooting connections and about the successes and failures of their mostly anonymous efforts.
One of those independents, Ken DiPietro, decided to jump into the fixed-wireless world because high-speed connections are rare or out of the question in his small, northern Vermont community.
DiPietro credits Mohr with creating an online "incubator" for wireless Internet service providers, or WISPs.
"People can come and ask for help, and a group of professionals will attack the problem and oftentimes get into heated, but polite, debates as to the most cost-effective way to beat the problem," he said. "I know of a couple of businesses which were born, nurtured and developed into full-scale WISPs directly related to Kory's work."
Today, Mohr is ready to more aggressively pursue customers. He talks of finding more places for antennae, so more parts of the city and surrounding counties could qualify for connections.
Even people in such rural communities as Dinwiddie and Montpelier have shown interest in fixed wireless. Mohr seems to be thinking big, relatively speaking.
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Mar. 19--The AT&T Broadbands, Verizons and Comcasts of the world claim millions of customers and manage sprawling, complex national networks.
