ISP Profile: Crocker Communications

When Matthew Crocker decided to set up an ISP, he simply had to persuade his mother that it was a good idea. Today, he's working on rolling out a variety of services, as they become economically viable.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [May 28, 2004]

When Matthew Crocker decided to set up an ISP, he simply had to persuade his mother that it was a good idea. The family business, Greenfield, Mass.-based Crocker Communications, was founded in 1963. By 1994, it was an answering business and call center providing small business telecommunications services.

The ISP was named the Internet Division of Crocker Communications, and was founded that year in Northhampton, Mass., near his college, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he majored in Computer Science (the college claims special prowess in wireless technology).

In 2001, the company beefed up the call center and added colocation (in Springfield, Mass.) to its business. Today, the company offers everything from dialup to T-3s, including webhosting, DSL, and ISDN. It serves both business and residential customers.

Crocker says he expects to continue to offer these products for the foreseeable future. "Dialup is dying, but I don't think it will ever go away," he says. "We're using NetSweeper and Propel [see article to follow on Tuesday] to slow the exodus, and we've had a good migration from residential dialup to residential DSL although many go to cable."

The Springfield, Mass. data center is key to the company's DSL strategy. Located in the Springfield Technical Community College Access Corporation (link unavailable), Crocker Communications has 5 CLECs on campus (Williams, MCI, Choice One, Lightship, and Northeast Optical Networks). The company also has access to Verizon.

Verizon is valuable
"We are wholesale partners with Verizon," Crocker explains to our surprise. "Verizon handles the last mile. They backhaul to our network here in Springfield. Our DSL customers are primarily business customers who want tech support that answers the phone. If residential customers are shopping by price, we won't get them, but if they're shopping for quality, we will."

Crocker is proud of the company. "We're not that much more expensive than Verizon, but we are that much better."

Working with Verizon has been easy, Crocker tells us, much to our surprise. "A year ago, everyone was telling us it would be a nightmare to deal with Verizon," he says. "We've been dealing with them since October. In some cases we did not get the forms filled out right but people have been very helpful with resubmitting them."

He accepts that the telco pace of business is slow. "We're moving at their pace. As long as we know what their pace is, we can plan around it. It turns out, it's four to five months' build time for one colo."

It's all about reducing costs. "The partnership with Verizon is great because it reduces capital expense and gives us a great market to work with. The downside is that it gives us little profit. We use Verizon to gain densities and when we have the density, we can build out in an area."

The company does have CLEC certification but cannot break into a market through a buildout without customers. "The CLEC business is capital intensive, although it does offer a higher profit margin."

The company has carved out a regional niche in Western Massachusetts, and that's how Crocker expects the future to look. "The concept is to be the number one ISP in Western Massachusetts. We want to own the 413 area code [see .pdf map]. That's where we all grew up."

Investing in more services, not more service areas
Instead of expanding out of its area, the company is looking to develop expertise in a greater variety of services. It has an unsuccessful 2.4 GHz broadband rollout in Northhampton, where coverage was incomplete, and is doing a more ambitious 900 MHz wireless broadband rollout in Springfield, focusing on business customers.

"It works well, but we're also doing Verizon DSL and the coverage areas overlap. It's cheaper for us to do DSL than to pay for radios and get wireless running," Crocker says.

The company is examining offering voice services, but has not yet deployed any hardware. "We have no class 4 or 5 switches, although we do have a partnership with Cisco so we can install a VoIP PBX and do that at the company level."

Full-fledged phone service would be more difficult to deploy. "Carrier telephony is something we're not doing but are looking into. We see a big demand for it. Hopefully, we'll have our first deployment by the end of the year."

Crocker likes the idea of video over broadband but is not ready to build it himself. "We'll be the bandwidth provider so they can get the content elsewhere."

Perhaps the fastest growing division is simply wiring up businesses. "We do the Cat-6 (GigE) wiring, the network install. We're branching out, layering on services."

Of course, if you're going to do this, you have to do it right. "The cabling division is run by my brother. He's a master electrician. What we bring to the table that the other guys don't have is a real trained electrician. Datacom is low voltage, so the electrical code doesn't apply completely, but it's good to do the neatness and labeling that comes as second nature to a trained electrician."

It sounds like a good business plan to us: trained, dedicated people providing high touch customer service and Internet access. It also sounds like the company can make the decision to deploy far more rapidly than a telco could—and can close down any new line of business if it doesn't work out. ISPs like Crocker Communications need to take advantage of any available opportunity.

Of course regulation is always a worry, but Crocker says the FCC has not harmed his business. "We're not doing line sharing, so the TRO was pretty good for us. The section covering DSL conditioned loops and UNE T-1 pricing makes sense and looks pretty good."

In the long run, a business like Crocker Communications could have an advantage over the monopolies because it is not tied to an old business plan, technology, or network topology. "We want to have a customer choose Crocker Communications because they want to work with us, and we'll choose a technology which, from a cost and reliability standpoint, works for them," concludes Crocker.

—End