Thursday, November 16, 2006

WISP “inundated” with service requests

Shingle Springs-based Direct Connect, one of El Dorado County’s first homegrown Internet Service Providers, reports overwhelming demand for its wireless Internet service.

Since becoming a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) in addition to its established wire line-based services earlier this year, the company has been “inundated” by requests for its terrestrial fixed wireless service, Direct Connect President & CEO Ken Garnett reported in a letter to potential subscribers this week. The WISP's service area is growing beyond the small 15-square mile area initially served earlier this year, now reaching to the western edges of Placerville and into Diamond Springs.

It’s certainly no surprise county residents are clamoring for the wireless service given the county’s many gaping broadband black holes where residents face a Hobson’s choice of dialup or satellite-based Internet access.

“With such a huge demand, it is extremely difficult to service everyone in a timely fashion,” Garnett writes. “In order to solve this problem, we are actively raising capital in order to accelerate our deployment capabilities…this will enable us to hire more installers and to more rapidly expand our network.” Garnett also notes that even within Direct Connect’s existing wireless service area, there are many locations that lie in a “shadowed” area unable to reliably receive service and in need of “additional backfilling” for complete coverage. “Expanding our network/service area will occur as rapidly as we are able to raise capital and thereby bolster our resources,” Garnett writes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It clearly doesn't work for me. I've been testing it off and on for the last two months. The service drops out several times a day. I have lost connections for anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours. Since it's not a mesh configuration, losing just one hop in my connection to their office causes my connection to fail.

I ordered the 3Mb service. I don't achieve that rate except in the middle of the night when few people are on. I understand they currently have a T3 and are turning up another T3, but clearly they have already oversubscribed the service.

I plan on cancelling the service later today.

Anonymous said...

I got that letter too.