by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Many college students look for a job during their last year of school. Others, like Mark Marques, start their own company.
Marques is the president and CEO of JoyTel Wireless, a new wireless Internet company that broadcasts its signal from the top of Independent Square.
Marques came up with the idea for JoyTel while he was finishing his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of North Florida. Just two days after his graduation ceremony last spring, he took on JoyTel’s first large project — unwiring Independent Square.
Now that the project is complete, every floor of the building has wireless Internet capabilities, the lobby has become a free Wi-Fi hot spot and JoyTel is transmitting its wireless Internet signal from the roof.
Marques said he created JoyTel to offer an alternative to large broadband Internet providers such as BellSouth and Comcast.
“I would like to think that I will not be in competition with the other wireless companies (such as Clearwire),” he said. “We are in competition with the big wired companies.”
Marques said his largest complaint with the big broadband companies is that they overcharge and underserve. He said larger companies will not spend the money to extend their high-speed Internet services to the most rural areas in Duval and St. Johns counties.
“I am sick and tired of people getting ripped off by these large companies,” he said. “Today, cell phones don’t cost as much as they did 10 years ago. So why haven’t Internet prices gone down?”
Marques said because JoyTel broadcasts its Internet signal via cell phone towers, he can offer cheaper and faster high-speed Internet service to rural areas without the cost of digging and laying new fiber optic cables.
“Huge companies have taken over,” he said. “It’s time for little companies to come up. Somebody has to go up against them.”
Marques said JoyTel’s signal can currently be received by subscribers up to 10 miles away from downtown, but he plans to expand the area monthly. For example, some of the downtown marinas should be online in the next coming weeks and sections of the Southside and Ponte Vedra Beach should be included in the service area by December.
To achieve his goal of providing coverage to the most rural areas of Duval and St. Johns counties, Marques has applied for a federal Rural Utilities Services loan, which will allow him to retransmit his signal from more than 20 cell phone towers in the area. The loan is part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture program aimed to help provide high-speed information services to rural areas. Marques said the federal funds should come through sometime in January.