During my visit to Austin this week, I stopped by Wayport and recorded this interview: David Vucina, CEO of Wayport, the leading hotspot infrastructure builder, reseller network, and managed services operator in the industry, lead me on a tour around their new facility in Austin, Texas. I have to say it's quite impressive. I wondered aloud why all the functions of the company were in one place: warehouse, hotspot assembly, customer service, network operation system, system management, and administration. But after taking the tour, it was pretty clear: the company is more like a big IT (information technology) department for hire than, for instance, an Internet service provider.
There are times in this virtual world when it's useful seeing firsthand how things are done. For instance, I was able to see the assembly facility Wayport is using to prep the equipment that goes into the field. They have a separate area for assembling custom McDonald's boxes because they're putting so many of them together. The assembly manager said that they had shipped over 400 hotspot boxes of all kinds in a recent day. They're typically handling site surveys for 25 to 100 sites per week, and that isn't slacking off.
A customer service operator gave me a tour through their CRM software that lets them slice and dice problems in a variety of ways, such as all previous problems that hotel room or how that particular user authenticated onto their network. This is typical stuff for any robust customer service/technical support operation, but the tools are quite nice and the Tier 2 reps have access to very level technical details about the access point or access port.
In the 30-minute audio interview I recorded with Vucina, we talked largely about the hotspot world, Wayport's position in it, and what the company will do when the U.S. becomes largely unwired. We also spoke about the nature of Wi-Fi in complement to 3G cellular data.
You can download the interview as a plain MP3 file [15 MB] or as a ZIP archive of that file [11 MB]