No wires? No problem Jim Rousseau brings the World Wide Web to rural Vermont
Jim Rousseau is the business manager and co-founder with Bob DeSorbo of Nowirz, (www.nowirz.com), a wireless networking, service and consulting company with offices in Waitsfield. Rousseau graduated from Champlain College in 1994. He worked for Engelberth Construction in Colchester for seven years, then Shawmut Design and Construction in Boston, followed by a few years in California before retuning to Vermont to start Nowirz in 2003. He is married and has four children ranging in age from 5 to 13. On the weekends, Russo teaches skiing and ski racing at Sugarbush resort, where he’s been skiing since he was 13.
VBM: I would be interested in starting by having you explain the services that Nowirz offers.
Rousseau: In a nutshell, Nowirz offers wired and wireless networking expertise. Convention centers, hotels, homeowner associations, schools - anywhere where you have people going on and off the network on a regular basis..
VBM: Is that computer and telephone?
Rousseau: Primarily computer. Our hardware infrastructure that we’ve chosen to go with for the last six years is now owned by HP ProCurve. That hardware platform is capable of handling voice over Internet protocol. In fact, that platform is a leading platform in that technology. That’s the HP ProCurve Mobility suite of products.
VBM: What is the history of your company? When and where did you start it?
Rousseau: Giving you my brief history before that, I’m actually a graduate of Howard Hughes High School in 1986, then Champlain College in 1994. I started my formal career at Engelberth Construction in Colchester, and I worked with them for seven years. I then went to Shawmut Design and Construction in Boston, were I was their information technologies person. I then went to California, and in 2002 when the dot-coms fell, I came home to Vermont. I started Nowirz in 2003. I’ve been in business successfully since then. We’ve concentrated on wireless networking as well as branched off into other projects. We work with corporate clients consulting on their IT infrastructure as well as website hosting and development.
Our greatest diversification is not so much under the Nowirz brand, but we’re also helping folks get rid of their old stuff as well. We’ve partnered up to provide the proper disposal of IT surplus and IT legacy equipment. So if a business is going under, we are very competitive in purchasing any surplus that they have, or if you have a business that’s taking on new technology, we’ll pick up that surplus. We’ll also take anything that’s just been sitting in the closet for way too long and needs to be disposed of. We make sure that it’s disposed of properly and not just buried in the ground. We’ve got downstream partnerships that we use to help with that process.
So we have a breadth of product, and my goal in taking on this latter is to go through and provide our customers with a cradle to grave IT solution. From the very first time that they’re looking at even getting serious about their IT infrastructure technology, to going through upgrading or even having to liquidate equipment. We even considered calling it Cradle-To-Grave Technology, but just decided that that was too much.
VBM: That’s similar to some European business profiles, where they not only create a product but they will also recycle the product at the end of it’s useful life.
Rousseau: It’s working out well. It’s the newest part of our venture.
VBM: How many employees do you have?
Rousseau: Very small. We’ve got four partners and two employees. We keep our overhead very low for that reason. We developed our business plan and our business model to be extraordinarily efficient. In the state of today’s economy we are quite happy with where we’re at. We don’t have any debt to speak of. Our business is primarily contracts, and we’re servicing those contracts at a very high level. So we’re able to hang on during this tough economic time and I’m very excited, as the economy starts to heat up, as to where we are going to be compared to a lot of those people who play in our space.
VBM: Is your company privately owned by you and your partners?
Rousseau: Yes, It’s a partnership LLC. I have three other partners, though I happen to be the primary shareholder.
VBM: Could you explain the technology of how wireless works, as in how wide an area it can service and what affects that service? How would you come in to, say, one of the remote ski towns and provide the tourists there with access to their e-mail and the Internet?
Rousseau: Sure. How does the technology work? The best analogy that you can put out there is that of your cordless phone in your home. You’ve got a base station that goes and gets dial tone from a wall plate. So you have a cable that goes from the wall plate to the base station, and then you have the remote phone itself that you can walk around with and it communicates back to the base station to give you dial tone. At some point, there is a range limit.
Wi-Fi technology is the exact same thing. It actually uses the same frequencies. So if you have Wi-Fi in the home you’ve got an access point, and then you have your laptop and you can walk around with it and it communicates back to the access point. The primary difference in the analogy is that in a Wi-Fi communication you have more than one handset it can handle, in fact it can handle up to about 30 per access point. Another major difference is that you can also put in a repeater, or some sort of bridge, so that you can extend your range much further than with your typical off-the-shelf handset and base station. They also have other frequencies that you can work within that go beyond the unlicensed frequencies.
As far as the range, the sky is the limit on that one. They ran tests in California where the limitation is the curvature of the Earth. It can go far. It comes down to strength of signal being sent, the size of the antenna and the topology in between.
VBM: Is Vermont a special challenge because it’s so mountainous?
Rousseau: Absolutely. When you take a look at the highest peaks in Vermont, a lot of them are on federally held lands and are very closely controlled. Not only that, but you also have the local zoning laws that make it very difficult to go through and get towers put up because we are a skiing and tourism destination. So we’re very cognizant of what it means to our statewide community to put up a tower on our picturesque landscape. Gov Douglas has created an organization that has gone through and approached communities about putting up towers, and they’ve done a great job. They eased up on some pole laws for Wi-Fi providers to be able to use power poles and other telephone communication poles. They’re advising us on how we can get onto mountain ridges and other landscapes, working with the local communities. There have been great strides and movement in getting these things done.
It does require line of sight, and Vermont is very difficult to work around with regard to wireless compared even to, say, Pennsylvania. It’s very hilly, but nothing insurmountable. If you’re at the top of a 120 foot tower, you can go pretty far. You put up 120 foot tower around here, and you’re going to hit the neighbor’s barn.
VBM: Some of the things they have been doing is putting antennas on the tall buildings in a community, say in a church tower or town hall. They’ve also put up towers that are intended to resemble trees and that blend into the surroundings. Is that still happening, and how has that worked out?
Rousseau: It is still happening and in the wireless broadband market that’s absolutely advantageous. Especially if you’re working with the local community and you’re trying to take into regard aesthetics as well as function. You’ll see stuff up on silos. I wish my coworkers in the industry would really work a little bit more on how to use different kinds of technologies to go and mitigate how much of it really has to be seen so that we could get more widespread coverage. A lot of times you look up on a silo even, and see a big, honking antenna. Well, you know what, maybe instead of a really big antenna on one silo how about a bunch of small ones on a bunch of silos? I think it’s a better approach.. But it often comes down to what you can negotiate with what property owner, what you have for equipment, the cost of doing it, and it does cost more to do it that way. It’s a give-and-take.
VBM: One of the goals of the Douglas administration is to have the entire state wired for broadband. Obviously some places are easier to do that with than others. How is your technology helping with this?
Rousseau: We don’t have any broadband coverage that we personally do. We have all the equipment, and we have a project that we would like to do, but we are short on capital. They are working in the Northeast Kingdom using this exact same technology to bring in broadband. These technologies are very applicable to rural regions.
VBM: One of the first interviews I did For Vermont Business Magazine was with Marc vanderHeyden, the then president of St. Michael’s College. I remember one of his comments was that they had just spent so many millions of dollars to wire the entire college campus underground for broadband just before the whole wireless technology came along and made that project obsolete. Is the same thing going to happen to wireless or is it the wave of the future?
Rousseau: Wireless is here to stay. In what flavor and what form? Well, it’s just like the weather, it’s constantly changing. However, these technologies that we use in wireless today, I first implemented myself when I was working in California. That was in 2000. So over the last 10 years it really hasn’t changed much. We’re using the same frequencies and the same basic technologies. We’ve had a couple of changes to improve reliability, and a couple of changes to improve speed. But overall, I can take a wireless card that I was using 10 years ago, and I can pop it into my laptop today and get into today’s technology.
VBM: Where do you see the technology going in 2015 or 2020? What’s coming down the pipeline?
Rousseau: I think we’ll see some loosening of what frequencies are available to the wireless technology in general. I’m speaking a little bit out of my direct knowledge here, but I think you’re going to see advances in the military use of wireless technology. Access to more frequencies is going to be the biggest change in the next 10 years, and improvements in existing technologies will be happening over the next five years. What that means for the consumer is that Wi-Fi is not going to change a lot. Wi-Fi as we know it today is going to be pretty stable for the next several years. Over the next 10 years, sure there may be a couple of upgrades, and those will absolutely bring some improvements, but they will also support the legacy technology and equipment, so upgrades won’t necessarily be a necessity. There’s nothing coming down the pipeline in the next five years that will force consumers to have an upgrade.
VBM: We know that the geography in Vermont is a challenge, what about operating a business here? Has this been a good state for your company? Are they supportive of this technology? What’s good, and what could be better?
Rousseau: Wow, that’s a loaded question right there! The tough part about this technology is that it’s so accessible that everybody seems to feel that they know how to run it. As a business owner, that’s one of my biggest challenges. My largest competitor is the guy down the street who thinks he can pull something off the shelf and make it work at business class standards. So the accessibility to the technology is there, but the understanding of how to go through and implement it and successfully manage it is not. That makes it tough.
I think in Vermont, specifically, the use of this technology is absolutely essential for our tourism base, offering Internet accessibility to people coming into the state. How we manage that, how we implement it, is important. If we’re going to have the pickup truck consultant down the street going through and implementing this, we’re going to have issues.
Our larger clean industry businesses, they know what this stuff is. These are smart people running smart companies. They know what the advantages are to this technology, and they know how to go through and implement it.
From a broadband perspective, the rural areas are hard to go through and get broadband to because of our mountainous regions and because of the local regulatory environment. If I need to get up onto a ridge, it’s tough. It’s tough because we are a tourist and destination a state that relies on our picturesque vistas. It’s tough and expensive to get into a very rural area. Take a look at Grafton, take a look at Ripton, take a look at Roxbury. I looked at the ridges and I looked at the vistas, and it’s tough. It could cost me $35,000 or $40,000 to get the equipment in place to provide broadband for 15 homes. It’s a little easier on the Western slope, but that’s already covered by the bigger providers like Comcast and Fairpoint. The only places they haven’t gotten to are the toughest places to get to. With Wi-Fi the way it is, it’s expensive, it’s expensive to get those towers put up. It’s expensive to get the equipment and to maintain the equipment.
VBM: Is any of the stimulus money going toward these sort of infrastructure improvements?
Rousseau: I personally haven’t seen any, but I can’t answer for other people in the field. I do know there are some projects getting some funding. What impact it’s actually having, I wouldn’t be able to answer.
VBM: One of the issues in the state of Vermont is getting qualified help. We have a lot of people that are well-trained, but many of them move out of state because of the poor wages here and the lack of jobs. Has that been an issue for you?
Rousseau: Workforce hiring in the state of Vermont, from my perspective, has been challenging. We were able to go through and execute a grant from the state of Vermont for workforce employment and training. I was bringing in some young talent that I really thought would go through and grow, because we were really able to train them at a very high level. My experience was that the training was not enough, the opportunity wasn’t growing fast enough. The opportunities outside of that training in the state of Vermont were still not enough to go through and maintain people where they really wanted to be. We didn’t have a good answer for them, I had a couple of good people go by the wayside because of that. It’s very difficult. You’ve got people who understand the level and value of the technical knowledge and experience that they have and what that’s worth outside of the state of Vermont. You get smart people who understand the technology, and these people are generally smart enough to understand their value.
VBM: And they know that they can go to another part of the country and make a lot more money.
Rousseau: Pretty quickly. That’s a really, really tough part of being in the state of Vermont. From my perspective, we’ve got a pretty well-balanced revenue stream as a state. Got some good stuff going on between the agricultural, our tourism, we’re constantly working on bringing in clean industry. But because of who we are and where we are and the culture that we have, even as the rest of the country sees us as a culture, we’re not going to go through and maintain highly skilled people who want more than what we can offer. We get those people who are highly skilled and want to settle in for either their midlife crisis or their later years. People who are done with the rat race and they want to come up here knowing exactly what they’re getting into. They’re set up for it and they don’t care. The up-and-coming? No, they are out of here.
As far as the workforce, it’s not even skilled employees that I’m looking for and having the hardest time with, it’s sales. I haven’t been able to find the right salespeople to sell this technology. It probably sounds arrogant, but I’m pretty damn good at it because I’ve been able to go and sell what we do and keep this business going for the last six years. But I haven’t been able to find someone who could match me in that and help me out with it. It’s not just the technical expertise. And Vermont is very frugal, compared to other parts of the country that I’m familiar with. Vermonters in general are unbelievably smart, and they know how to squeeze the hell out of everything. They know the value of stuff.
We’re looking at really going through and helping people get the value out of the IT infrastructure that they have and have paid for. We want to go through and help the lifecycle a lot more. One of the things that I’ve seen in working on networks, is that IT networks are not up-to-date as they need to be. Part of it is that they have so much invested in their existing infrastructure and it costs so much to get into a new infrastructure or to update the infrastructure, that they need help.
We’ve developed relationships where we can go through and offer that help to them. We can go through and say, listen, we’re going to be able to pay you for this stuff. You’re not going to have to go through and pay us to get rid of it. Especially if we get it early enough in the technology cycle, we’re going to be able to go through and offer them a decent value for that equipment, helping them to do an offset for any upgrades that need to take place. That’s going to ripple effect all the way through to allow for businesses to maintain a more modernized IT infrastructure, which is going to help them in their business and ultimately helps their customers.
VBM: Is there anything we haven’t talked about that should be a part of this article?
Rousseau: I’m hoping that the community is starting to become more educated that, whether it’s a wireless or wired networking system, having somebody out there who actually knows what they’re doing help them with their technology. I say that with extreme candor, that there are too many people out there that are trying to do it themselves. When you’re a baker, you don’t try to fix your own shoes. People should stick to their core competencies and feel good about hiring someone to help them on the other stuff. Networking is a huge thing. Secured networking, making sure that things are secure, making sure that their customers are taken care of, whether it’s point-of-sale or logging onto a wireless network at a hotel, it’s important.
That’s where we really step in and shine very well. No hassles, no worries, no wires. We go in and take care of your networking needs and we manage it for you so you can go and take care of your core competencies.
by Robert Smith. Robert Smith is a writer, photographer and editor of the Green Mountain Outlook in Bellows Falls. He can be reached at robfs52@yahoo.com.