Surfing Roads Less Traveled

DigitalBridge's WiMax has meant big things for some local customers. Bruce Herker runs a Rexburg business called Eastern Idaho Sports Network, which broadcasts high school sports live online. In the beginning, he had to ensure he had access to a telephone line at a particular stadium to stream audio to people who couldn't make the game.

Now he plugs in a DigitalBridge modem, connects his video camera and streams live video to the Web.

In November, he broadcast a high school championship football game from the campus of Idaho State University in Pocatello. Later he learned that one player's father serving in the military watched from Turkey, another player's brother watched from Iraq and the daughter of the head coach watched from China.

"As an audio station, you're just like radio," Herker said. "With video, that's completely different."

WiMax technology is not the only one trying to speed up connections. The big mobile companies routinely unveil networks that promise to give consumers faster links to the Web. AT&T, Verizon and others have placed their bets on a competing technology called Long Term Evolution.

"There was a time when we viewed WiMax as the brave new world and the only player in the broadband mobile space," said Berge Ayvazian, an analyst at Yankee Group. As cellular companies such as Verizon unleash new technologies, he said, "there will be a full head-on competition between WiMax providers and cellular-based mobile operators."

DigitalBridge says it is unfazed.

"We think that is going to be four years away," Wallace said.

DigitalBridge, with about $10 million in annual sales, is one of the largest recipients of venture capital in the region, having received more than $30 million from Novak Biddle Venture partners, Paladin Capital Group and the venture arm of Clark Enterprises. It recently hired Scott Royster, a top executive at Lanham-based Radio One, as chief financial officer.

One risk is that the installation of WiMax base stations could run into the same technical problems that cellular towers did in the early years of mobile phones, such as frequent breakdowns. That's been a particular concern among some analysts for Sprint, which with its partners is making a huge financial commitment to building the service in expensive metropolitan areas.

Chief executive P. Kelley Dunne came up with the idea for DigitalBridge several years ago, while standing atop the tallest building in Grundy, Va., population 1,105.

He realized that rather than making the big financial commitment that a Sprint would in a big city, a company could build a network bit by bit.

"We can build networks around where there's existing demand," he said.