Monday, December 15, 2008

Eric Stumberg of Tengo Internet Talks about Tengo Internet and Municipal Wi-Fi Implementations

What does TengoInternet do?

We provide high speed internet management services for outdoor parks and campsites.
It’s mostly amenity internet with added business applications, so we provide members all the deployment and management and support networks.

Do you cover the Texas Parks & Wildlife?

We are operated a 3 year pilot with them. The pilot proved that their users wanted it; but the state parks decided that they wanted to actually manage that project internally.

Do they pay for it?

We’re ran a guest-supported pilot for three years. We use satellite to handle the remote locations. Normally when you are remote like that, you need to share the back haul costs with your regular applications. The back haul is a big component.

Sounds similar to municipal Wi-Fi. What ever happened to that?

The business model is challenged. No one wants to pay for it, except for municipal services. It’s consistent with a lot of the municipal Wi-Fi deployments – there is no quality of service or revenue guarantees - EarthLink tried to use an advertising and subscriber model in a couple of areas. They failed. If you have an anchor tenant it works. If you don’t, it won’t work.

What are you working on these days?

The extending the reach of WiFi into our customer’s networks, expanding our media platform for advertising directly to our subscribers, integrating social networking tools into tech support – such as Twitter, and others..

Where do you see Tengo Internet in 5 years?
Bigger and deeper in an expanded space. We will become the dominant player in outdoor hospitality network management services.


Best regards,
Hall T.

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