Early last year, Orange-based WorldWide Wireless Networks Inc. became a publicly listed company through a reverse merger, with its shares selling for pennies on the over-the-counter market.
In the past year, it’s announced a few relatively small contracts with the police departments in Newport Beach and Garden Grove, a hotel in Orange and the Orange County government to install wide-area networks. It also has started a joint venture with Garden Grove-based Bridge Technology Inc. to develop a wireless Internet access system for the Asian market, and is testing products with Newport Beach-based Conexant Systems Inc. and Irvine-based Broadcom Corp.
The company reported gross revenues of $728,138 for the fourth quarter ending Dec. 31, up 155% from the same period of the previous year. It reported a loss of $294,000, up from $134,000 the same period in 1998. The company said the loss was due to a significant expansion in property, along with increased staffing of sales and telemarketing personnel.
The company installs equipment to provide broadband wireless Internet utilizing spectrum microwave technology. In other words, while most computers use coaxial cables or regular copper phone lines to hook to the Internet, WorldWide uses radio modems.
That’s good enough for investors. As of late last week, shares of the 36-employee WorldWide Wireless Networks were up to more than $7 a share and it had a market cap of about $80 million.
Meanwhile, Chairman and CEO Jack Tortorice said the company is looking at four different financial packages that could provide up to $20 million in funding. He declined to give more details, but said it could be done within a month.
“They’re coming out of the woodwork to talk to us. Wireless is primetime and there’s a lot of credibility that it will perform where DSL will not,” he said.
The company is more widely known by its subsidiary, Global Pacific Wireless Internet. It has an $8,000 contract to provide mobile wireless broadband connectivity to Newport Beach’s patrol cars. It has a $25,000 contract for a wide-area network to connect Garden Grove’s 10 police substations, with a possible goal of patrol cars being connected in the future. The Hawthorne Suites Hotel in Orange also recently picked the company to install a system where existing wiring can be used instead of running new cable or copper lines to obtain high-speed access to the Internet. The company has a $40,000 contract to provide a backup to the Orange County government’s Internet backbone connection. It’s also in talks with Orange, Anaheim and Irvine.
The contracts are not covering costs, but are a way for the company to establish a niche in this market in Southern California.
“There are 120 law-enforcement agencies in Southern California, so these are trial tests,” said Carl Bjorck, VP of business development and marketing for Global Pacific Wireless Technology. He said smaller police departments are quicker to make decisions and are more open to high tech. The company is aiming to use these small markets as an example for its main target, the Los Angeles Police Department.
As for the Broadcom and Conexant work, Tortorice said: “We’ve been in very close contact with those players and the products and services they’re launching. They like having in their back yard a playground to test their products.”
He added that OC’s two communications-chip giants “are still six months away from radio technology.” n
