Newroads Offers New SDSL Service

Vantage Telecom LLC, doing business as Newroads Telecom, is introducing synchronous digital subscriber line service to Benton and Washington counties. The Fort Smith competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) previously offered SDSL solely in the Arkansas River Valley, but it’s expanding up the Boston Mountains to Northwest Arkansas.

SDSL is primarily a commercial product with a monthly cost of $120 to $400 for connectivity ranging from 192K to 2.3MB. The speed, and subsequently the tier-priced services that are available, depends on the user’s distance from one of Newroads’ incumbent local exchange carrier central offices. ILECs are set up in the downtown areas of Bentonville, Rogers, Lowell, Springdale and Fayetteville.

SDSLs are similar to asynchronous digital subscriber lines, which are already available locally from Southwestern Bell and Alltel Corp for about $50 per month. But ADSLs, which are more of a residential product, upload faster than they download. SDSLs do both at the same speed. That makes it more of a carrier-class circuit, which means their “up” or working times are more frequent.

By comparison, T1 lines that are available locally from Bell offer about 1.5MB of connectivity and cost an office more than $900 per month.

“We want to be a high-tech, high-touch company,” said Kendall Price, Newroads’ sales manager. “You can actually get a hold of our technical support staff. We’re focused on customer service and customization for business … Our reception in Northwest Arkansas has been good enough that we will continue doing business up here.”

Newroads, based locally at Rogers’ plush Pinnacle Point, is owned by Wayne King. He sold Fort Smith-based Ipa.net in March of 1999 to OneMain.com as part of a roll-up of 17 regional Internet service providers for what was supposed to be an IPO. At the time, Ipa.net was Arkansas’ largest ISP with about 90,000 subscribers statewide.

But OneMain, which had about 700,000 subscribers, was bought out by Earthlink Inc. in September of 2000 for $308 million.

King’s new firm has been a CLEC since July 2000. In February, Newroads started providing wireless and point-to-point services for companies and individuals in the river valley. It already boasts more than 80 commercial wireless point-to-point customers from Greenwood to Alma.

Another 3,000 subscribers use Newroads’ local phone, long-distance, Web-hosting and dial-up and broadband Internet products. All of its services are readily available in Northwest Arkansas except wireless point-to-point. Newroads is in the design phase for a wireless network that will offer 3.5MB connectivity in Benton and Washington counties. The wireless point-to-point cost is about $589 per month, including circuit and bandwidth charges.

Price said Newroads’ long distance phone service is “well below” the 10 cents per minute that national carrier TV ads have made popular.

Vantage bought out Rogers ISPs Arkansas Network Services Inc. in May and Telexcom in June. That gave the company points of presence in Fayetteville, Fort Smith and two in Rogers. Then on July 1, Vantage bought content filter firm Netegra LLC of Fort Smith to add server-side site sifting to its arsenal. None of the terms of the acquisitions have been disclosed.

Unlike previous Arkansas companies that relied solely on selling ISP products, Price said his CLEC is well positioned because of its diversity. Getting a slice of the state’s $1.5 billion local phone service market doesn’t hurt.

Newroads hopes to be in five states in five years and expand its coverage to more than 80 Midwestern cities. During the first quarter of 2002, it will spend $1.8 million to establish its own switching facility in Fort Smith. Cell phone service also will follow next year.