@LARGE
Speed DemonBy Scott Kirsner
The official top speed of Ric Fulop's black Mercedes Kompressor coupe is 140 miles per hour. But right now, we're crawling down Charles Street, and the speed that matters is not mph, but kbps.
Fulop's Kompressor gets the fastest Internet access of any car in Boston. As we inch down Charles Street and then up Beacon, we're watching movie previews, downloading software, surfing News.com, and marveling at video clips of the NBA's best all-time slam dunks.
Every once in a while, Fulop, 26, leans over to check the connection speed. (Like most of this city's drivers, he believes the occasional glance through the windshield will suffice.) Technically, the network that Fulop's company, Broadband2Wireless, is building can hit 1.5 megabits per second. But today, it's hovering around 700 kilobits per second (kbps) - much faster than an analog or DSL modem, and comparable to the speed of a cable modem.
Two stubby antennas poke up from either side of the car's roof, just above the rear window. On top of the pull-out cupholder on the dashboard, Fulop has lashed a small black box that looks like a radar detector on steroids (it's actually a modem). A laptop perched on the passenger's knees is connected to the stereo, so that when we listen to U2's ''Mysterious Ways,'' downloaded from Napster, it plays through the Mercedes' speaker system.
Broadband2Wireless is about to launch its high-speed wireless service in Boston, and Fulop's Mercedes is the company's demo-mobile. The service itself isn't designed for cars; it's targeted to home offices and small businesses where broadband via cable modem isn't available, and where DSL either isn't an option or people are fed up with the companies that provide it. ''The network is initially intended to be fixed wireless,'' meaning a computer sitting on a desk, says BB2W CEO Paul Adams, ''but when there's enough network coverage, we'll be able to support mobility.''
Broadband2Wireless is intended to be easier to install than other broadband services. You'll order a small modem-and-antenna set-up over the Web, it'll be sent to you via FedEx along with an installation CD-ROM, you'll use the CD-ROM to configure your machine, and that's it: You're online. No installer need visit.
In the past few weeks, Broadband2Wireless has begun blanketing the Back Bay, South End, and Beacon Hill - its initial service areas - with flyers touting ''Airora: the Airborne Internet.'' Lucky flyer recipients get a two-month free trial, after which the service costs $50 a month. Some of the early users of the service, Fulop tells me, are people like Ken Novack, vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, Ken Morse of MIT's Entrepreneurship Center, Peter Lynch and several other Fidelity honchos - all of whom live in the previously broadband-bereft Back Bay and Beacon Hill.
The company is based in a brand-new office building at the eastern tip of the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal, with spectacular views of the harbor and Logan Airport. It's got 80 employees, $30 million in funding from investors like Credit Suisse and Howard Anderson's YankeeTek Ventures. Adams, one of the founders of RCN, is BB2W's chief executive; Fulop and Adams are its cochairmen.
Fulop says that Broadband2Wireless's infrastructure is easy and inexpensive to build out, which means that the service could eventually be cheaper than the $50 per month that both AT&T Broadband and Broadband2Wireless charge today. ''What Broadband2Wireless will do is drive down the price of broadband for consumers and for ISPs,'' Fulop says.
In Boston, five ''hub sites'' will support 130 microcell antennas. The microcells are just 17 inches tall, and virtually indistinguishable from a lightning rod, so Fulop says they shouldn't attract any unwanted attention from nosy architectural commissions on the Hill and in Back Bay. The 130 microcells - only 15 have been erected so far - will eventually cover 20 square miles of Greater Boston. Adams brags that it took technicians just a day to install a single microcell in Quincy that can serve 250 homes.
Already, Broadband2Wireless has started building networks in other cities, and within the year should offer service in Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York. But the company won't be alone in marketing its high-speed wireless access in those cities; it has embarked on a not-yet-announced partnership with Earthlink to resell BB2W's services. The company will pursue other ISPs as well.
Fulop's entrepreneurial pedigree is impressive. At 16, he finished high school in Venezuela and used some leftover bar mitzvah money to start a software distributorship. Before long, the company was raking in $1 million a year. His next company sold parametric modeling software to customers like Harvard and NASA. In 1994, after selling that company, he came to Boston to attend Babson College. ''It was a great vacation [from building a business],'' Fulop says. ''I would sit in the library, use [the early Web browser] Mosaic, and read about the Internet.''
Though Fulop dropped out of Babson in 1996, the company he started in his dorm room there, Arepa, survives today as Into Networks. It helps software publishers stream their content over broadband connections - you can play ''Deer Hunter'' without owning the CD-ROM - and is now available in more than 2.6 million homes. Another company Fulop helped start, Chinook Communications of Lexington, is working on equipment that will increase the speed of cable modems by as much as 3,000 percent.
Into Networks, Chinook, and BB2W are all focused on speed: delivering content faster over the Net. Fulop can't really explain exactly what people will do with their faster access, but he knows they want it, and he's convinced that if he doesn't offer it first, someone else will. His vision is aligned with that of Berkshires soothsayer George Gilder; Fulop imagines a world where bandwidth is plentiful and cheap. You'll watch a movie preview on your Palm while standing outside the theater deciding what to see, or listen to a customized traffic report in your car.
Plenty of speedbumps remain in the road ahead of Broadband2Wireless. While competitors like Metricom, OmniSky, Sprint, and AT&T aren't yet offering services with connection speeds rivaling BB2W's, they will soon. Some of those competitors will transmit on the same 2.4 gigaherz band of the unlicensed spectrum, which could create problems and slow down customers' connection speeds.
Fulop says the company will need to raise another $80 million later this year to finance its expansion, which could be difficult given investors' wary mood and Metricom's recent financial travails. And BB2W will be challenged to deliver adequate customer service as the company grows and enters new markets.
It's not always easy to turn a cool demo into a money-making, sustainable business. But that's the task facing Fulop and Adams.
If they succeed, it won't be long before more vehicles are outfitted like Fulop's Mercedes. At the speed we've been meandering around Beacon Hill, hunting for music videos on the Net, broadband-to-the-car is going to have a very unfortunate impact on city traffic.
Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.