Richard Clark, the President and CEO of GoNetspeed, calculates that the founding team behind the ISP holds about 100 years of experience in broadband operations and construction. Formed in 2021 from the merging of OTELCO, OTTC, Upstate Fiber Networks, Lantek, and Icon with the previous iteration of the company, the freshly-consolidated GoNetspeed is focused on rolling out one product and one product only: fiber.
Each of the companies that merged under the GoNetspeed umbrella historically operated in varying states, but as of 2023, their footprint comprises communities in Maine, Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and West Virginia. Since the major merger in 2021, the GoNetspeed team has passed nearly 390,000 homes and businesses.
“The last two years more than doubled the number of communities [we’ve reached] and the amount of network we’ve built [within] the companies,” said Clark. GoNetspeed currently serves 200 communities across these nine key states with another twenty slated for completion by the end of 2023.
A timely partnership with Oak Hill Capital in January 2021 allowed GoNetspeed to consolidate and expand their reach across the historic footprint—and fully fund that process privately. “Oak Hill is an investor and we’re funding all of our builds with private investment without the use of taxpayer dollars,” said Clark. “It gives us the opportunity to go [and] build faster.”
Of the nine operating states, Connecticut has seen the most new miles of fiber network built out in the past two years. As of late, the team is focused on building aggressively across New York, Maine, and Massachusetts.
Clark estimates that about 95 percent of builds to date have been freshly-laid fiber. About five percent of projects across the nine-state territory were overbuilt to update historic DSL networks that one of the legacy organizations had, with potentially more on the way. “[We’re] judiciously overbuilding others as we move through the rest of the footprint,” said Clark.
Considering that GoNetspeed is privately held, Clark declined to note market penetration rates in completed territories, though he noted that the team was satisfied with the amount of customers switching over to their product line.
While GoNetspeed’s self-funded framework doesn’t exactly depend on grant allotments expected to come from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program in June, the team is keeping an eye on how the cards fall in the case that the stars align with a potential project site. “[We] never say no to the places that [need] high-speed internet. We try to work with them,” Clark explained. “Sometimes we have to educate them on what it really costs to build and operate a network so they have a better understanding.”
When it comes to how each of GoNetspeed’s towns are chosen for a fresh fiber run, a large part of the equation comes down to where the legacy companies operated historically.
“These are communities that are a part of the three operating communities… They’re rural areas and small to medium-sized towns. [Often] they’re towns with [connections from] cable television or telephone companies and they haven’t upgraded their network,” said Paul Griswold, SVP of Global Marketing and GM of New York Operations. “We bring that new technology to that town and [it] didn’t cost [the] taxpayer anything.”
As GoNetspeed intensifies builds in the Northeast, glaring statistics on still-underserved communities are top of mind for Clark. “[In Massachusetts], 81 percent of Berkshire County residents have one provider. In 76 percent of Springfield, the third-largest city in Massachusetts, [there is only] one broadband provider. We’re typically the second provider… We bring competition, which creates a better value for the consumer in the long run.”
When it comes to further acquisitions and mergers, GoNetspeed isn’t focused on it at the moment, though prospects are never exactly off the table. “I think the way I would put it is this: We talk to everybody. We haven’t found anything in the last two years that was of interest to us,” Clark said.
This time next year, the team will be geared up and following-through on a host of new projects that have been in the works for a year or two already. “There’s an awful lot of opportunities in the states we’re focused on,” Clark concluded.