Clearwire and Cbeyond

I had the honor of joining with Cbeyond's Brooks Robinson, Chief Marketing Officer (and CO Founder), and Vince Zappa, Senior Director of Mobile Operations. Cbeyond started in late 1999 with the strategy to target the small business market for Dedicated Voice and Data services over T1. They quickly pioneered impressive cutting edge services, such as providing privately managed VoIP services and dynamic allocation of bandwidth for improved QoS. Over the last few years however, their product offering has been evolving, identifying cost effective ways to integrate an entire software suite of services to their customers for a wide range of pro SMB applications.

In addition to hosted services, Cbeyond entered into an agreement with a CDMA provider to offer mobile voice, mobile data (via blackberry and android devices), as well as mobile broadband via 3G USB dongles and so forth as a true-to-life MVNO. Cbeyond has been very successful with this model; so much in fact that they have achieved over 30% penetration of mobile products into their client portfolio. This means over 1/3 of their customers not only purchase landline services but also mobile as well - very impressive indeed. "[The Clearwire agreement] is really an evolution of our business" added Robinson "we've been providing 3G laptop cards and we also provide a wireless backup service as well, essentially used for three components of our customers business, • Backing up the data of their servers and PC's • Backing up (redundancy) for the T1 failover • Cloud based Automated Attendant It's in the wireless backup service that the real experimentation is taking place. They have not worked (from an engineering perspective) with point to multi-point microwave devices such as those required on the Clearwire WiMax network. Cbeyond purchases "white label" (non-branded) devices that will be WiMax enabled to use not only for the backup business model, but also for their mobile products as well. "We have been in mobile since '06, we are confident that we can penetrate our mobile market with our 4G products" Said Robinson.

Cbeyond does business in 14 tier 1 markets, all of which will be lit with Clearwire's WiMax network by the end of the 4th quarter 2010. Brooks Robinson is excited about the opportunity ahead "We are excited about the potential of our relationship with Clearwire - I think what Clearwire saw with Cbeyond was a company that understood technology and has a firm grip on the small business [telecom space] and more importantly, distribution. These kinds of technologies can be somewhat underserved to the SMB customer, but with Cbeyond our value is in bringing this product with our trusted brand to the busy small business owner."