World Wide Packets, the Spokane developer of fiber-optic networking equipment targeted at bringing gigabit data transmission speeds to residential and business customers, is moving forward at lightning speed.


The latest venture of Ethernet guru Bernard Daines has, in just 13 months, already raised $60 million in equity funding and now employs a staff of 170 people. It expects to employ 300 by year-end.


During the last 12 months, World Wide Packets finished development and beta tested its first line of products, which include the hardware and software needed to distribute within a home or small office super-high-speed Internet, television audio and visual, voice, and other data communications over a single fiber-optic cable.


Now, World Wide Packets is enhancing those products for additional applications, and transitioning from production of prototypes and small test orders to mass production, says Daines, its president and CEO.


Daines says he expects within the next few weeks to reach an arrangement with a contract manufacturer that will be ready to begin making the products when the Spokane Valley company lands its first big order. It also is seeking what are called channel partners to resell its products both in the U.S. and internationally, says company spokeswoman Nancy Good-speed.


If those pieces all fall into place as planned, says Daines, World Wide Packets should become profitable sometime next year.


Things have been moving fairly quickly, says Daines. He adds that the companys employment growth has exceeded his expectations, as has the speed at which World Wide Packets name has spread through the marketplace.


Last week, Daines spoke to a group of people in London about the future of gigabit Ethernet and about World Wide Packets. He has other speaking engagements planned again in London and in Paris in coming months, as well as in several U.S. cities.


World Wide Packets, which employed 10 people just over a year ago, now employs 130 people in Spokane, 27 at a facility in Portland, and 12 others in small sales offices scattered around the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The company has been adding about a dozen employees a month and expects to continue to add people at that pace throughout the year.


Due to that growth, World Wide Packets already has outgrown both its Spokane and Portland facilities. Last weekend, its Portland office moved to a 13,300-square-foot facility in Beaverton, Ore., thats twice as large as its previous quarters. That new office, which is staffed primarily with software engineers and designers of microprocessor chips, is expected to double its employment numbers to about 60 by year-end, says Paul Capano, the companys vice president of human resources here.


Next month, about 30 employees here will be relocated from World Wide Packets headquarters in the newly remodeled former Future Shop building at 115 N. Sullivan to a recently completed addition at a 39,600-square-foot building that Daines owns in Liberty Lake. That facility, located at 23403 E. Mission, is has been named the Liberty Lake Internet Portal building, and includes a basement designed eventually to serve as a regional Internet host site.


World Wide Packets sales, global service and support, and quality assurance departments, as well as some administrative staff will occupy the three-story addition to the Internet Portal building. Also to be located there are a customer-service call center and two sales labs that will be equipped with working demonstrations of the companys products.


The rest of that building houses Artesian Direct, a Spokane computer-hardware and information appliance customization company that moved here from Federal Way, Wash., last spring; Webiness, a Web developer originally launched by Daines and others but recently acquired by Artesian; and the office of Liberty Lake dentist Ross Simonds. Daines in an investor and a member of the board of directors of Artesian Direct.


World Wide Packets headquarters building on Sullivan will continue to house its engineering, finance, human resources, information systems, and marketing departments, as well as a research and development lab, a residential demonstration room, and a marketing demonstration lab.


Complete product line


The companys products, which include two pieces of hardware and a supporting software application, together enable an individual or a business to connect simultaneously to the Internet through an Internet service provider (ISP), to get audio and video such as from a cable-TV provider, and to get telephone serviceall via a fiber-optic network at extremely fast speeds. The products are branded with the LightningEdge name.


One of the two pieces of hardware is called an access portal. Its about the size of a hardback book and essentially distributes through gigabit Ethernet cabling the various types of data and signals that arrive at the users house or office via fiber-optic cable. The portal includes multiple ports or channels into which a number of devices such as a computer, a television, a digital entertainment system, and a voice-over-IP phone can be connected. Though not all such home devices today currently have Ethernet-ready ports, World Wide Packets expects manufacturers soon will routinely include them. Once they do, users will be able to get their phone, TV-channel package, and Internet service all over the same strand of fiber and receive a single bill for those services from one consolidating provider.


The access portal can be installed just about anywherein homes, apartments, hospital rooms, home-based offices, hotel rooms, cruise ships, and airplanes, Goodspeed says.


The product was beta tested in Ephrata, Wash., by the Grant County Public Utility District, where the PUD installed fiber to most homes and businesses and provided about 100 of them with the access portals for the test. In the test, the participants were able to get just Internet access through the devices, but at speeds up to 1,000 times faster than most modems provide, Goodspeed says.


The other World Wide Packets product is called an access distributor, which is a larger piece of equipment that connects a number of access portals to an Internet backbone or a public telephone networkall via fiber optics. The software, meanwhile, enables public utilities, cable companies, and others to gather usage-based statistics and to provide billing information for the various services that end users would pay for through use of the system.


By the end of next month, World Wide Packets expects to sign its contract with a large manufacturer that would mass-produce the access portal and access distributor. The Spokane company then expects to sell the products to public utilities, cable, and telecommunications companies, and residential developers.


Daines says, however, that right now public utilities look like the hottest market because they seem to be the fastest to embrace the technology and are looking for new revenue sources, especially in the face of industry deregulation and market volatility. As a result, a number of utilities are installing fiber-optic networks to take advantage of the emerging technology of integrated voice, video, and high-speed data transmissions.


Many utilities are realizing that their customers are stuck behind the times, and theyre working right now to bring them into the real world, Daines says. He contends that gigabit Ethernet is the only solution that will solve the lack-of-bandwidth challenges currently facing some providers.


Cable companies also are expected to feel the bandwidth pinch soon as more customers begin demanding the ability to download high-definition video. Daines says that he eventually expects cable companies to begin buying World Wide Packets equipment because existing cable network systems arent going to be able to carry all of the video that customers will be demanding.


Some companies say they already provide video-on-demand, but really customers can choose only to download one of three movies, Daines says. Eventually, I believe that customers will be able to get onto the Internet and find any movie they want to see and download it. I also think that youll find episodes of major TV shows stored on servers soon, and youll be able to pay a buck or two and download your favorite TV episodes.


To do that, though, requires bandwidth.


Some people cant imagine how theyre going to use so much bandwidth (as is provided through gigabit Ethernet), but others are seeing the benefits, Daines says. He adds that World Wide Packets challenge now simply is a matter of matching our products to the market.