The Tuttle family of Strasburg, Colo., became the first subscriber of Wildblue Communications Inc.‘s two-way broadband satellite service June 2, and if the service turns out to be successful, the family will have secured a tiny place in satellite broadband history.
Bijou Telephone Cooperative, a member of the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) that provides telephone and dial-up Internet services to about 2,500 customers in a region east of Denver, completed the first paid Wildblue subscriber installation.
With the first customer officially on board, the focus of the NRTC, an organization that supports more than 1,200 rural electric and telephone utility member organizations, turns to promoting the service to rural customers through its members. Wildblue service initially is being promoted through NRTC members. More than 280 members signed up to distribute the service, said Mark Brown, senior vice president, member business support at the NRTC, said.
The first wave of Wildblue customers are expected to come from the beta testing group, which the company said was in the hundreds of subscribers (SN, May 30).
“We expect 100 percent of our beta testers to start paying for the service,” Brown said. “Basically, all of them have paid for the equipment in anticipation of the service going live and will start to pay for the service later. And the feedback has been excellent, so I have no reason to believe that once the beta program is finished, they are going to drop the service.”
Once the beta testers are converted to paying customers, the next task will be to take care of the backlog of potential customers that have expressed interest in the service. While Brown did not have a nationwide number, he offered some anecdotal evidence to illustrate the buzz surrounding Wildblue.
“Some of our members in the upper Midwest, in the Great Lakes region, Ohio and Indiana literally have 1,500 to 1,800 people on a waiting list for the service and they have not even started advertising it yet,” Brown said. “Folks are practically beating their doors down to sign up for service, get on a waiting list, pay deposits, whatever they have to do to be the first one in the territory to get access to the service.”
With that many people expressing interest before the beginning of the advertising push, it could take a bit of time to bring everyone on line.
“For our members to be able to get access to enough equipment to meet the demand they have on their waiting lists, we are probably talking two to three months to actually work through the lists,” Brown said. “It will be well into August before our members in most cases work through their lists. That is not even taking into account what they are going to begin advertising.”
He said the advertising push likely is going to begin in July, after the Wildblue gateways, located in Cheyenne, Wyo., Laredo, Texas, Syracuse, N.Y., Riverside, Calif., and Winnipeg, Manitoba, are brought online to handle commercial traffic. All gateways are carrying traffic from the beta testers but only the Cheyenne gateway is prepared to carry full commercial traffic, Brown said.
Starting Cheap
Wildblue is offering three tiers of monthly service: Value Pack – $49.95 for speeds up to 512 kilobits per second, Select Pack – $69.95 for speeds up to 1.0 megabits per second and Pro Pack – $79.95 for speeds up to 1.5 Mbps. All packages include Internet services, including e-mail and Web space; the Wildblue Portal, which features news, information and entertainment; customer care and an equipment warranty. Wildblue initially will offer its equipment package for $299 and installation for $179.95. NRTC members will offer free installation as a special rollout promotion.
Brown said he expects the cheapest service offering to be one the new subscribers choose at the outset.
“We think that probably 90 percent of the subscribers are going to see the lower end offer as being just right to meet their needs,” Brown said. “It is comparable to what you see for DSL and it is comparably priced. We look to it to be the flagship that really carries the bulk of the traffic that we will have on the satellite initially.”
In the long term, Brown sees users migrating to one of the higher level service offerings.
“As killer apps are developed to drive broadband usage, we see a lot of folks wanting to migrate up to a higher price packages and the higher speed packages,” Brown added. “I think streaming video being a big one as people are wanting to download movies or watch movies in real time or on demand.”
–Gregory Twachtman
(Mark Brown, NRTC, 703/787-7287)
