With all the recent noise about WiMAX high speed wireless broadband and municipal WiFi, I decided to call one of the few companies actually servicing wireless broadband customers: Towerstream (.com). They started several years ago by using pre-WiMAX certified equipment to deliver high speed wireless broadband to customers in the northeast and now serve companies in Boston, New York, Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Newport and Providence, R.I.

According to CEO Jeff Thompson, they're doing great, but CEOs always say that. Let's have a test: if you need a T1, they can deliver it in 48 hours and will charge about half what a legacy telecom company will charge. Need 100Mbps? Similar delivery and price schedule. Want to double your T1? One click in their control center, and you double your bandwidth. That's why Thompson says they're doing great.

"We've seen a huge push to support video in the last nine months," said Thompson when we connected. "The mid-cap area of around 6-10Mbps is a real sweet spot for people moving from a T1 being overwhelmed with video training or WebEx meetings. We can jump from 5Mps to 10Mbps in our mid-cap product with one keystroke."

While it may look silly to build their own high speed wireless broadband infrastructure when every other provider relies on Verizon, ATT, or the other legacy telecom monopolies, Thompson firmly believes that's one big part of their success.

"We learned from the CLECs that you can't rent from competitors and then rely on them for service," he said. Add in the fact the monopolies call all new DS3 and faster installations fiber, which they don't have to share, and Towerstream's approach makes great sense.

And WiMAX and Municipal WiFi? "WiMAX certified equipment helps lower our costs, but we're not interested in Mobile WIMAX or Municipal WiFi per se," said Thompson. "But we'll be happy to provide backhaul services for any WiMAX or Municipal WiFi providers."

Bottom line from Thompson? "We're able to deliver high speed Internet access in the 6-200Mbps range in days with SLAs exceeding legacy providers with fiber like performance and instant upgrades. And we come through the roof, not a conduit in the basement."