Cometa CEO reveals further details on start-up

Cometa Networks, a start-up founded in December by a group including AT&T Wireless, IBM and Intel Capital, plans to build 20,000 802.11b (or Wi-Fi) public-access hotspots in the U.S. designed for 11 million laptop-lugging enterprise VPN users. CEO Larry Brilliant recently outlined the company's progress for Network World Senior Editor John Cox.

So what's been happening since December?

We're looking for, and have signed, some resellers [carriers and service providers] and some real-estate owners [such as retail chains]. We'll announce these in a few weeks. Of the 25 or so service providers that offer DSL, cable, dial-up, Ethernet or cellular services, we want to partner with them all.

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Cometa Networks, a start-up founded in December by a group including AT&T Wireless, IBM and Intel Capital, plans to build 20,000 802.11b (or Wi-Fi) public-access hotspots in the U.S. designed for 11 million laptop-lugging enterprise VPN users. CEO Larry Brilliant recently outlined the company's progress for Network World Senior Editor John Cox.

So what's been happening since December?

We're looking for, and have signed, some resellers [carriers and service providers] and some real-estate owners [such as retail chains]. We'll announce these in a few weeks. Of the 25 or so service providers that offer DSL, cable, dial-up, Ethernet or cellular services, we want to partner with them all.

You've got these giant companies behind you. What's taking so long?

Cometa is not a joint venture. It's a start-up. We just happen to be a start-up with wonderful partners. But we face all the challenges that any start-up faces: We have lots of resumés coming in, but no one person devoted to going through all of them. We still have to find our own auditors, our own health insurance coverage and so on.

When we attend meetings with a carrier, they bring in 40 people and we send two. They say, 'Where are the rest of you?' God forbid if we have three meetings in one day.

But you still expect to meet your goals, even though you haven't started actually building Wi-Fi hotspots?

We'll have 5,000 hotspots by the end of 2003 or the first quarter of 2004. That will be more hotspots in the U.S. from one vendor than anyone has now. Two years from now, we'll have 20,000 in the top 20 metropolitan statistical areas.

Many companies are trying to get into the public-access Wi-Fi. How is Cometa different?

We spent nine months [before launching in December] with 40 full-time professionals from IBM, Intel and AT&T. We interviewed CIOs, CFOs and CEOs. We did original research on the corporate road warriors. Each [founding] partner had its own interests and assets. And our venture capitalists wanted a capital-lite model that would offload the costs onto the manufacturing partners.

This led us to the wholesale model. We use our partners' resources to install and support the access points, to integrate with billing systems, to negotiate with real estate owners and so on. All the things like branding, billing, customer acquisition and customer service we leave to the carriers and service providers, which already are doing this for pennies. By leveraging the resources of all these partners, we created something that has real value to the enterprise executives and real staying power.

Why does it have value for them?

The CIO will mandate that hotspot service be bulletproof, secure, available 24-7, and has client software that lets the enterprise's VPN work robustly from the hotspot locations. The CFO will say, 'Get me a billing system that shows me how many of our left-handed marketeers in Detroit suburbs are using Wi-Fi after 5 p.m.'

No [company] will trust the most important corporate processes to some kind of freenet Wi-Fi. It's just not going to happen.