In early March, Ethernity sent a contingent from its sales and marketing leadership to Louisville, Kentucky for this year’s edition of WISPAmerica, one of the two annual conferences and trade shows of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association. Whereas WISPA holds its other annual show, WISPApalooza, in Las Vegas each October, it likes to move WISPAmerica around to various cities, and this year Louisville got the call.
This year, Ethernity was doing a lot more than pitching its wares in a standard booth. We brought two brand new UEP2025 appliances with us to display a live demo of our patented Link Bonding technology, much as we had done this past fall at NetworkX. The primary difference, though, was that the demo in Amsterdam last October was run over the older UEP-20 devices, whereas we were officially launching the UEP2025 for sales at WISPAmerica.
We also brought along the prototype of the newly announced UEP3808, which offers potential solutions as either an XGS-PON and GPON OLT or as a multi-FPGA bonding unit that can handle multiple towers in a single box.
Ethernity also arranged to present a live session on the agenda entitled “Free Your Network From Vendor Lock-in With Seamless L1 Link Bonding”. At around 2PM on the first day of the conference, VP Marketing Brian Klaff highlighted the significant advantages of Ethernity’s Bonding over Link Aggregation (LAG) and other proprietary bonding solutions, drawing a nice crowd of highly engaged attendees, many of whom hung around afterwards to ask detailed questions.
Thereafter, interest in our Bonding technology was swift and constant. Whether it was because people were attracted by the stark difference between the monitor showing pixelated video performance over LAG compared to the clean, sharp video performance over Ethernity’s Bonding, or whether it was from word-of-mouth after the presentation, Ethernity’s booth was almost never lacking for inquiries from WISP owners.
In fact, word-of-mouth is a unique and powerful thing at WISPA shows. Unlike most other trade shows, in which most of the attendees are competing to find technologies and products that will give them an advantage over their counterparts, WISPA shows are highly collaborative. WISPs are not in competition with each other, so they are very supportive of one another, often cluing each other in on the latest and best solutions that can improve performance and save money. As such, it wasn’t long before dozens of WISP owners had taken an interest in Ethernity.
One particular attendee who heard about our Bonding, but who does not represent a specific WISP, was Tommy Croghan from the top industry-related podcast, The Brothers WISP. Tommy stopped by the booth to see the demo on Tuesday morning, chatted with Sr. Director of Sales Israel Ferber, and arranged to interview Brian for the podcast early Thursday morning. We’ve embedded the video of that interview above, and we’ll add a link to the full podcast when it is released.
Overall, Ethernity came away from WISPAmerica with tens of excellent leads, including several WISPs that expressed interest in ordering and installing a couple UEP2025 appliances to try out the Bonding technology in their base stations. The show can be qualified as a terrific success for the company, and the momentum is definitely building. Ethernity is now eager to prove itself so that the WISPApalooza show in Las Vegas in October leads to even greater progress toward introducing the UEP2025 throughout the WISPA market.
