T6 Blog How Rise Broadband Is Creating A Wireless Broadband Giant - TechRockies

How Rise Broadband Is Creating A Wireless Broadband Giant - TechRockies Published May 17, 2016 In a world of increasing importance of Internet connectivity, there's an insatiable appetite for faster, broadband Internet access. However, that high speed access is often hard to get-particularly in more rural and suburban areas. Englewood, Colorado-based Rise Broadband (www.risebroadband.com) is capitalizing on that hunger for high speed, Internet access, via what is a fast growing, fixed wireless broadband Internet network. We caught up with Jeff Kohler, Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer of Rise, to hear about how the company has grown to serve nearly 200,000 customers across 16 states, and now has over 800 employees and more than $145M in annual revenues. For those not familiar with Rise, tell us a bit about your business? Jeff Kohler: We started the operation in 2006. We are largely an industry consolidator. There are a couple of thousand wireless ISPs in the United States, which are typically small companies that provide broadband services normally underserved, or unserved by other broadband providers. Those ISPs have an average size of about 1200 subscribers. Over the course of the last 10 years, we have acquired 113 of those small companies, mostly focused in the Midwest and the Western part of the United States. We have now grown to 185,000 subscribers, through a combination of these acquisitions and very aggressive marketing of our services. That's quite a few acquisitions to digest-how did you manage that? Jeff Kohler: For a long period of time there, we were almost acquiring a company a month. For example, in the State of Colorado, we have acquired 35 companies. The same could be said of Utah, and we acquired around 35 companies there. The reason for the M&A activity in this space, is there are mostly small companies, who are under-capitalized. We're in an industry, where people's appetite for broadband is really limitless. The problem is these small companies are often forced to have to reinvest, and reinvest, and reinvest in their network infrastructure on their tower, to deliver a decent, competitive service. That's where lots of the companies hit a wall. They either can't make it to that next round of investments, or prefer not to make those next rounds of investments. That's really what's fed that pipeline of acquisitions. What's your background, and how did you end up here? Jeff Kohler: I spent 25 years in the wireless industry, with AT&T Wireless, and also was an investment banker. I used to raise money and do M&A for wireless companies. During that time, I used to get approached all of the time by these small, wireless ISPs, looking for their next round of capital to make those investments in their network. But, all of them were just too small to raise money to do those things. That's where I initially got the idea, that if you could put together enough of these ISPs in one, larger, company, you could actually have a very, profitable large business. [...]The post How Rise Broadband Is Creating A Wireless Broadband Giant - TechRockies appeared first on Rise Broadband.