of REON Broadband. (Brian
McDonald)
Company: REON Broadband
Location: 300 Nickerson Road, Marlborough, Mass.
Web site: www.reonbroadband.com
Owners: BancBoston Ventures and Seaport Capital
Employees: 36
Established: 1999
Annual sales: WND
It’s part high tech, part real estate, and just to classify his company, REON (Real Estate On Net) Broadband Chief Executive Officer Tom Remillard had to coin a new acronym: BLEC.
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Working with building owners and real estate companies, REON, through its Building Local Exchange Carrier (BLEC®) program, offers tenants always-on high-speed Internet access, network security, back-up storage and additional IT services — the company is making buildings “smarter.”
“Once we’ve established a building in a particular area, that building acts as a point of presence (POP) for the entire neighborhood,” Remillard said.
This means that Internet access is not only available for the tenants of a given building, but for occupants in the buildings next door or two blocks away as well. And for a “lit”(wired for Internet access) building’s tenants, this in-house POP means virtually instant Internet connectivity.
“A tenant moves in on Monday, they’re hooked up on Tuesday,” Remillard said.
“It’s very attractive to new tenants, knowing they can have immediate connectivity,” said Kristine Mangan, the REON account executive in charge of the company’s Rhode Island properties.
Remillard said it is cheaper for tenants to access the Internet from a pre-provisioned building. The cost of networking is distance-sensitive, he said, and in a building that is not already wired, each tenant must connect to the Internet separately.
In wiring these buildings, Remillard said he hopes to do more than connect people to the Internet – he wants to enhance and become part of the building’s community.
“We have pretty strict criteria in terms of what buildings we light,” he said. “For instance, our typical building is 80,000 square feet with 24 tenants.”
Before wiring a building, REON conducts a series of three surveys: one on the building’s tenants to gauge demand for service; one on the building’s existing infrastructure; and one on broadband availability to the area.
“We go neighborhood by neighborhood,” Remillard said. “A lot of people are starting to refer to broadband as the fourth utility. You’ve gotta have broadband.”
There are five BLECS competing today in the Boston area, Remillard said, but he feels that what sets REON apart is “I focus on areas that other people haven’t.”
Remillard said that while many of his competitors adopted the “dotcom model” for doing business – a presence in 50 or more markets, rapid growth, IPO – REON has chosen to develop its business base in smaller areas.
Instead of targeting Boston and the immediately surrounding area, “we had a business model that, instead of saying ‘Let’s go five miles wide and one mile deep,’ said ‘Let’s go one mile wide and five miles deep.'”
To wire a typical building is free to the property’s owner, but typically costs REON around $60,000 to $70,000, Remillard said. The wiring process can take anywhere from two to 12 weeks, depending on the building.
The majority of Remillard’s experience in telecommunications and real estate was developed as the founder/principal of New England Real Estate Telecom, where he provided leasing, development, and consulting services to some of the nation’s leading communication companies including WinStar, Advanced Radio Telecom, Teligent, and AT&T Wireless.
Most recently, Remillard was vice president of development for Eureka Broadband, a New York-based “building-centric” telecommunications provider targeting first-tier markets.
“I pulled out of that,” he said. “I said ‘I don’t see anyone doing this in Waltham, I don’t see anyone doing this in Newton, I don’t see anyone doing this in Providence.'”
In 1999, with $17.5 million in venture capital funding from BancBoston Ventures and Seaport Capital, Remillard formed REON with the mission of targeting more suburban areas, second- and third-tier markets throughout New England.
“That’s our specialty,” he said. “We shine in these areas – broadband under-served areas.”
It’s a mission that Remillard acknowledged might be shifting slightly.
“We were always about ‘Don’t go to downtown Boston,’ but in the last three or four months, we’ve been getting calls from owners there,” he said. “We’re starting to take a hard look at that.”
REON’s clientele is also a little different than Remillard once projected.
“When we first wrote our business plan, we thought our main customer base was going to be small businesses – four or five people,” he said.
“We have many buildings where it’s one person, and others where it’s many more,” said Mangan. “It (broadband service) used to be a luxury, now it’s a necessity. We’ve had owners call us, but we’ve also had tenants”
“People will call us and say ‘I’m moving from 123 Main Street – where are your other buildings?'” said Remillard.
REON Broadband has “lit” (read: installed a fiber optic broadband network) 122 buildings throughout New England, including eight in Rhode Island (One Davol Square and the Turks Head Building among them). The company is currently looking at other Rhode Island markets for possible expansion, including Cranston and Woonsocket.
Because the company works in a lot of older buildings, many of them converted to office space from other uses, “all of REON’s buildings are very different,” Remillard said. “The Turks Head – I’d have to say it’s probably one of the largest buildings we have.”
Mangan said that Rhode Island has been a good market for the company because “there’s such a need for it. You’re dealing with graphic designers, architects. Creative people bring the Internet – it’s a necessity, not a luxury. They need high speed. They’re on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
In addition to expanding to new markets, many of them possibly in Rhode Island, Remillard said “we’re always working on new technology – not necessarily leading the technology curve, but following the technology curve.”
REON is currently testing a videoconferencing service and is also exploring possibilities in wireless technology offerings.
Ask Remillard his favorite part of his job and the answer involves a different kind of building.
“I like the relationship building,” he said. “I like that when you light a building, you’re a part of that community with the property owners and the real estate companies.”
And it is those relationships that Remillard feels is the key to being competitive.
“You have to have a relationship in place, and that’s where I think REON is adding a lot of value,” he said.
