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January 30, 2007

Speakeasy Sells Wireless Unit to Towerstream

By Glenn Fleishman

Seattle-based Speakeasy sheds early fixed WiMax project: Speakeasy is a national DSL and dial-up ISP that has moved heavily in VoIP, pushing VoIP and broadband over naked DSL (no phone line required) service. They installed some fixed WiMax in downtown Seattle two years ago with a beautiful launch I attended up at the top of the Space Needle. But things didn’t go as planned: they were unfortunately naive enough to believe that their customers could self-install receivers. Tricia Duryee at The Seattle Times reports that the VoIP rollout was seen as more strategically important—I have two Speakeasy VoIP lines myself—and thus the wireless unit needed to be off the table. Speakeasy stopped promoting the service some time ago, and likely has few customers.

Towerstream gets an easy entree into a new market, and ostensibly will be inheriting a variety of rooftop leases and a partner for promoting the service locally. While Speakeasy offers T-1 and DSL service for business, they can certainly gain from working with Towerstream to court businesses with high-bandwidth needs more aggressively to which they can market VoIP and other packages.

Speakeasy has customers nationally, so this partnership could be an aid to Towerstream in customer acquisition outside Seattle as well.

Posted by Glennf at January 30, 2007 1:21 PM

Categories: deals

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