The Underdog Internet Providers Head to Washington

“Kind of like a union?” I ask Craig Foster. “Eh, yeah,” he says, “except without the union part.” Foster, the CFO of Ubiquiti Networks, was in New York this week, in part to talk about the Ubiquiti World Network, a trade group that will bring together smaller wireless Internet service providers and give them what they really need: a lobbyist.

Ubiquiti, whose chief executive officer, Robert Pera, was profiled in Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year, makes hardware that sends Internet signals over long distances without wires. Your phone carrier does this, but Ubiquiti’s customers, unlike your phone carrier, use unlicensed spectrum. That is, they don’t have an exclusive license from the Federal Communications Commission to transmit. Instead, they send their signals over certain, limited frequencies that have been set aside for anyone to use. Read more...