Summary: Need help with PR? If you are looking for a great PR firm, you've found one. Walker Sands is a leading Chicago PR firm with a strong track record that makes it one of top national PR agencies..

Company is in the process of rolling out a citywide high-speed wireless network

Tyler van Houwelingen is online searching for an Internet radio station. He picks a station and starts surfing the Internet. It seems normal, except Van Houwelingen is riding shotgun in a truck traveling 60 mph on N.M. 528.
(article continues below useful links)

The driver, his brother Nick, asks him to change the station. Van Houwelingen selects another station and it loads almost instantly. Welcome to wireless Rio Rancho, well, northern Rio Rancho.

Van Houwelingen's company Azulstar is in the process of rolling out a citywide highspeed wireless network.

"We're going 60 miles an hour and streaming music, it's great," Van Houwelingen said. "We think what we have here is the premier mobile network."

Azulstar has turned the Enchanted Hills subdivision at the city's northern edge into a large wireless hotspot.

The neighborhood is the first to have the wireless service, which should be available throughout the city by March 15.

Rio Rancho awarded a 25-year license agreement to Azulstar late last year.

Azulstar is a subsidiary of Ottawa Wireless, which was founded by Van Houwelingen in Michigan.

Ottawa Wireless made Grand Haven, Mich., one of the first to have a citywide high-speed wireless network.

Azulstar's agreement with Rio Rancho allows the company to use city-owned rights of way, buildings and light poles for its antennas.

In exchange, the city will pocket a small percentage of the company's profits if the network is successful.

In Enchanted Hills, there are 14 wireless antennas. The 15-foot antennas are mounted on light poles to cover the area with high- speed wireless service.

"Enchanted Hills was a good test because it was a long shot," Van Houwelingen said, referring to the distance from Enchanted Hills to the company's office near N.M. 528 and Southern Boulevard.

Azulstar is casting its signal from its office to a tower on top of the Intel plant. That tower throws the signal to the far end of Rio Rancho where it is rebroadcast through the neighborhood.

"It takes us 15 minutes to drive to Enchanted Hills but our signal gets there and back in milliseconds," Van Houwelingen said.

The company currently has about 200 subscribers. That number includes both business and residential users.

As the Van Houwelingens leave Enchanted Hills and turn south on N.M. 528, Nick van Houwelingen, director of operations for Ottawa Wireless, points to an antenna in River's Edge III.

"That one should come on today," he said.

Azulstar is currently installing antennas in all three River's Edge developments, which run along the east side of N.M. 528 up to Corrales Road.

Tyler van Houwelingen said Azulstar is currently installing four antennas a day and plans to double that next week.

"We need to put up about 150 or 160 more antennas," Van Houwelingen said. "As we ramp up that won't take long at all."

The only neighborhoods that might come on line late are those without power poles.

Van Houwelingen said he was working with the city on a solution.

As the company works to expand residential service, it already has its business service in place. It is using a different frequency for that service.

The company has a tiered pricing structure based on the speed of service.

The basic rate is $19.99 a month for a residential connection with a download speed of 256 kilobytes per second.

The connection is about as fast as a cable or DSL connection.

If a customer is willing to pay for it, download rates can be as fast as 1.5 megabytes per second, the equivalent of T1 connection. That service costs $39.95 a month.

Copyright © 2005. Albuquerque Journal.