Bluespan Wireless CEO, Scott Stace, jumped on Wake Up Tucson this week to bring the Southern Arizona community up to speed on Bluespan’s mission and how it all works.
Here are just some of the highlights!
“Comcast or Cox or these services come out and say, ‘we’re going to give you 100Mb of data,’ what they’re not really telling you is – yeah, on a good day you’re going to get that, but on a bad day you’re going to get whomp whomp whomp sad trombone. So what we found is that the providers in the local area were nonexistent in terms of quality of service and things of that nature. So what we did is we said, ‘we’re network guys, let’s build a product that is useable,’ - it’s reliable, you don’t have to have 100 Mb to do everything you want, what you need is good quality bandwidth.”
“What we tell people is, it’s a shared bandwidth type of solution. So you’re on a node in a community, and you’re sharing that node with everybody else. You bring a lot of bandwidth in but when peak usage time goes up - every kid is home from school, using Netflix - all of the sudden your bandwidth just starts to collapse. You get that swirlygig when you want to watch something, or you know, you sit there and pull your hair out. We are more of a dedicated service, meaning that we don’t share with your neighbor, we go straight from us to you, and we bring fiber optic right through a microwave link to you. So it’s a much different scenario.”
“Yeah they’re telling you you’re getting 100 Mb. They’re saying we’re going to give you a 100 Mb slice of our freeway. Over here we’ll get you a different freeway. So I tell people, listen, if I give you a freeway to drive on and I give you one lane but I put you as the only car on it – great! What happens if I’m Comcast or Cox and I say, ‘I’ll give you twenty lanes but I’ll put you right in the middle of downtown rush hour traffic,’ which would you rather drive on?”
“Not to bash those companies – when your service works well it works well, but we have a much more consistent product that does exactly what we guarantee it will do. Plain and simple.”
“We are a local company - you’ll speak to a local person, we’ll take a look at your information, we’ll make sure that you can get service. Most people can, especially in the rural areas. If you get far out in Marana where there’s no service, or you’re in Mescal-J6 or you’re on the east side, east of Houghton Road where you can’t even get DSL, or if you do you’re lucky if you get 1 Mb – we have all of those areas covered. We cover all the way up to Picacho Peak, and all the way down to the Mexican border, Sonoita - now we’re all over out there and a lot of these people who don’t have service look to us because they can actually get a good quality product. So it’s not just for local Tucson residents.”
“What we’ll do is talk to the person and find out what they need, what their usage patterns are, and build a plan around that. We’re not about selling you something you don’t need. Let’s put what you need in and then if you need more we can always give you more. But we’ll qualify your address for service, and then we’ll come out and install it for you. It’s really that simple.”
“The nice thing, too, about us is we can take care of your business, your house - in multiple areas where you’d have to use 4-5 providers. We can give you one provider. And we can tie them all together as if they’re all on net.”