The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
In this episode of the Broadband Bunch, we speak with Brian Worthen, President of Visionary Broadband and CEO of Mammoth Networks. When you live in a state such as Wyoming you have to roll up your sleeves and get things done. This can-do spirit lives throughout Visionary Broadband and our episode. Discussion topics include:
Craig Corbin:
Welcome to The Broadband Bunch, a podcast about broadband and how it impacts all of us. The Broadband Bunch, as always, is sponsored by ETI Software.
Craig Corbin:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another edition of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Craig Corbin, along with my colleague, Trevor Odom. Thanks so much for joining us. For more than a quarter of a century, Visionary Broadband has been blazing communications trails throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Founded in a basement, Visionary was the pioneering internet service provider in Wyoming and has now grown into the largest and most geographically diverse ISP in a three-state region, providing internet access to more than 20,000 customers via wireless, DSL, T1, and fiber. Visionary is focused on providing quality internet service by customizing products for underserved markets, with a priority on service to the customer and financial benefit distant second. Visionary was a founding member of both the Bighorn Fiber Network and Yellowstone Regional Internet Exchange.
Craig Corbin:
As Visionary grew, so too did their expertise in broadband communications and carrier management, knowledge which eventually resulted in the genesis of Mammoth Networks, the facilities–[based aggregator of wholesale data services, providing service across the contiguous 48 states and Canada. Mammoth simplifies telecommunications infrastructure by consolidating multiple access technologies and carriers on a single network and delivering to their partners over a single interface. Our guest today has been a driving force in both of these organizations with the goal, as he puts it, to “out-behave the telecom market and develop a company that ties together the fiber carrier environment into a single ethernet platform.” It is a pleasure to introduce the president of Visionary Communications and CEO of Mammoth Networks, Brian Worthen. Brian, welcome to the Broadband Bunch.
Brian Worthen:
Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me.
Craig Corbin:
It’s absolutely a pleasure to be able to visit with you, and so much to talk about with both of these organizations. But before we get started, for those who are not as familiar with you in particular and with Visionary and Mammoth, give us that 30,000-foot overview, if you would.
Brian Worthen:
It’s interesting, about our business, we’re in the second least dense state in the nation. So we have six people per square mile in Wyoming. Western Colorado is not too far behind that. So for some reason or another, we’ve chosen to duke it out and build a telecom company in the middle of nowhere and figured out a way to do it and make a living for ourselves as well. In the years that we’ve put in from growing up from a dial-up company into a network operator and a provider of broadband services, we’ve taken all those years of knowledge and assembled a team that can do just about anything. That’s the exciting part about my business. I’m really proud of what my team has done in that regard and figuring out constructive and unique ways of delivering broadband in towns of 300 people.
Craig Corbin:
Such a challenge, when you talk about taking services into underserved areas. Obviously, that’s been something that you have succeeded in, though. Congratulations on that quarter of a century of service with Visionary. Take us back to the early years in the organization and the mindset that had to be in place for Visionary to become reality.
Brian Worthen:
The mindset is simply the fact that we’re in this area of the country that’s just roll up your sleeves and get things done. In fact, I often tell people, I rarely hear around the office, “We can’t do that,” or “We’ve never done that before.” But the best example is when we started offering broadband, we were developing a wireless platform and a DSL platform at the same time. We really weren’t stuck to one. We were pretty agnostic. We just wanted to get our customers to service. My founder and I were out drilling floors and COs and working with the CO techs to put equipment in Qwest central offices so we can offer DSL and do that before even CenturyLink and Qwest did. That mentality permeates our organization.
Brian Worthen:
The entire organization is built from people that have been here quite a long time. I’ve got guys that have a big responsibility within the organization that has been with me since they were 15 to 16 and coming out of tech support and our web design department. Now, they’re running a Juniper 480 router. This is just a roll-up-your-sleeves environment, that’s how we’ve gotten to this point, is we just forged ahead. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s really not a program or some sort of college or trade education built around what we do. We just had to do it. That’s the cool part about our business.
Craig Corbin:
I know a big part of your success, Brian, has been that the systems are all designed as redundant, and that’s a big part of being able to work in areas that you’re dealing with in the Rockies. Talk about that if you would.
Brian Worthen:
We’re really big here on… First of all, all of our employees that are within our service area are given an internet connection as part of their employment, and there’s a reason for that. We want them to be on the same network as our customers. What’s cool about that is everybody that has broadband through us says, “I want this thing to run so I can do what I want to do on the weekends, or I’m not woken up in the middle of the night to fix something.” As a result, and because the carrier environment is really mostly single-threaded, especially when you’re looking at the RBOC and whatnot, there’s really not dual-path environment and not a fail-over path or diverse route.
Brian Worthen:
Over the years, we’ve put a lot of emphases and focus on buying a second or even a third route out of a community. Once we get to certain customer size and a certain adoption rate, we will create a redundant route. But the continuance of that is even though it’s a small town, and I’m thinking of a couple in Southeast Wyoming, we still have more than one route out of the community, one might be fiber and one might be a microwave connection using the licensed microwave. The best example I can give you is December of 2018, there was a nationwide outage with a national carrier. We use them for a lot of our backbone. We’re in 116 communities. I was only down in one community out of those 116. It’d be easy to look at that and say, “Man, we should’ve planned better.” I think that’s emphasizing, we did plan better. In that community, within three months, we put in a second route.
Brian Worthen:
We learn from our mistakes, and because our employees are on that same network and want to have a barbecue on Sunday without getting called to drive four hours away and fix something, we build it right. It is the more expensive way to do it, but the fact of the matter does not only do we have residential customers on that network, but we also have business customers, small businesses, enterprise businesses. We have state. We have cellular. We have wholesale customers. They’re all on the same internet backhaul or private backhaul network that we have. We have to be responsible for our customers and then pair that with our desire for some sanity in our lives. It’s well worth the investment.
Trevor Odom:
Thanks for the recap on that. Tell me a little bit about the cellular piece. That’s kind of where my background extends from. Just curiosity, was there any complexities of working with the cellular side as far as the backbone, or was it just dealing with the traditional broadband guys on the backbone?
Brian Worthen:
Cellular guys are most demanding and rightly so. Everybody is using that for critical communications. In fact, a lot of people are using that for broadband. In some homes, that’s their only broadband solution. They’ve got a requirement that you meet their RFC tests, the birth certificate test, constant monitoring. So we had to learn through the years to put equipment in the network that allows us to monitor, like a CDN and some others that allow us to do real-time testing and reporting and whatnot. But the difficult aspect of it is getting to the size where it’s worth your time, worth their time, actually. In our case, we’re actually not the size that’s worth their time, but we serve a lot of areas where nobody else does. And so, we wind up with what a lot of cell providers called orphan sites, where these are sites that no matter how many times they run them through their normal list of carriers, they can’t find a solution for.
Brian Worthen:
That’s been the interesting part about our evolution, is we’ve picked up because we’re in the most backwoods of the Rockies. We’ve picked up a number of contracts with cellular carriers, just because there’s no other feasible option. We just built a connection in Eagle County for a cellular provider. I think one of their execs was riding on I-73 Eagle County dropped a call, got frustrated, and we had to build a few miles of fiber along utility poles to get that accomplished. I think there’s a number of folks, like myself, that are our size that are willing to do that in small-town America, but it requires some tenacity when you’re talking about working with the big companies, like self-providers.
Trevor Odom:
Most definitely. You keep re-explaining the underserved area. I guess that’s one of the main motives of that corridor of these towns that you support. I’m seeing a lot of these challenges in North Georgia as well when you start getting up into the Blue Ridge Mountains. I mean, are there any other motives to more of the smaller underserved communities other than that, or was that just the main driver?
Brian Worthen:
Everybody right now, I think, in telecom, whether you’re a cell carrier or a phone company or a cable company or a competitive provider, like myself, and even the equity guys and the utilities, they’re all looking at a map right now, saying, “Where are there holes?” They’re looking at the FCC 477 data, saying, “What hasn’t been served?” They’re looking at Ookla speed tests. So I think right now, especially with the fervor in broadband that we have as resulted from COVID and from the realization that DSL is not good enough, I think that everybody in this business is looking to solve a problem. I don’t think it matters, the town size anymore. I think the focus is these federal funds that are coming down the pipe, these state programs. There are going to be multiple funding sources that focus on an area, just like RDOF did last year.
Brian Worthen:
There are areas where people are just simply identifying holes and trying to fill those to take advantage of these programs or maximize their return on investment, or just find some uniqueness. In fact, I would elaborate on that. As we’ve expanded our network, we built out in some areas just as a test market. And because we’ve figured out ways to do this affordably, we’ll go into a market and plant a seed or just toss them around a little bit and sprinkle water and see what grows. I think there are just more and more people doing that all the time. I don’t think that broadband is even in the 10% adoption potential that it could be.
Craig Corbin:
You’re listening to The Broadband Bunch. Our guest today, the president of Visionary Communications and CEO of Mammoth Networks, Brian Worthen. Brian, I know that there are a lot of people who have heard of Mammoth Networks and know about what is going on now, but I’m curious about the story of what led, I guess, from Visionary to the creation of Mammoth. Tell us about how that all came together.
Brian Worthen:
We were really good at rolling out broadband and it was very easy because we’re a dial-up company at the time. And so, all we did was look at our radius logs or our customer usage. Anybody using over 40 hours a month, we would reach out to them and sell them a wireless or a DSL connection. We had a lot of DSL adoption at the time. We were building a CenturyLink platform for DSL. We were using New Edge and a few others. But as a result of that, we actually were encouraging strongly our customers to get off dial-up. We had a contract with Qwest at the time for 100 T1s. As we kept moving customers off dial-up, we had fewer and fewer people calling into those T1s. So it got to a point where we were spending 40,000 a month with Qwest on T1s that wasn’t even taking calls. These were around Wyoming specifically.
Brian Worthen:
So $40,000 a month was just going out the door. We looked at this in the fall or the winter of 2004 and said, “Man, there’s got to be something we can do.” We decided we would order DSL hosts in other states, and so, expand beyond our traditional Wyoming footprint. We ordered DSL hosts or fiber-based hosts in Montana, Idaho, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Northern Colorado, and Denver. We found a way to do that pretty affordably. But in the end, it was a $64,000 a month investment. Not only do we have to buy new circuits from CenturyLink to replace the $40,000 a month we weren’t using, but we also had to backhaul those back to our network, because we love layer 2. We don’t want to be reliant on somebody else’s network. We love to handle our own failover.
Brian Worthen:
We took 40,000 a month we weren’t making money on, and it turned to $64,000 a month we weren’t making money on. It was a big risk. Some people would call that like a back of the napkin or a whiteboard type thing, and that’s literally what it was. It was a discussion around how we could migrate contract value away from dial-up T1 to something that was a value. At the time, we thought we were going to retail and offer retail services in these other states, but our community had less than 3% unemployment because I come from a traditional blue-collar town and we instantly had to change to wholesale. Suddenly, providers started jumping on our network. We got a contract with somebody to Washington, so we expand it up to Washington. We got a contract with somebody in Oregon, so we expanded to Oregon.
Brian Worthen:
Pretty soon, by 2009, we’re covering our 14 states, the old Qwest markets. We’d come in overnight, and there would be like 40 Wendy’s restaurants on the network that wasn’t on it the day before and 30 post offices. It just blew us away. We built this platform that was pretty unique because it was layer 2. We automated it to the point where our life was pretty good, but it was the emphasis and the reason for doing that was totally just to get rid of some contract value. It was the spending of $40,000 a month that incentivize us to suddenly start a wholesale platform, and we didn’t know anything about wholesale.
Craig Corbin:
That is amazing. When you talk about serving that part of the country, everything is spread out. I know you’ve embraced multiple ways of doing that. But when you have the wireless component in the mix, it takes a lot of towers to cover that much territory. Talk about the construction element of that.
Brian Worthen:
The towers are interesting. We are on traditional towers. We lease from people like American Tower and SBA. We build our own towers. We operate over 500 tower sites in some form or another from Butte, Montana, all the way to Farmington, New Mexico. We have tower crews. We have people that climb every day. We have 57 vehicles in the field now. We’ve changed pretty dramatically since 2009. In fact, this metamorphosis has been occurring just in the last three or four years, because we see a need in rural America to get more connectivity out there.
Brian Worthen:
A lot of times, the way to jump into a market is with a wireless product first. It is quite a bit of work, but also, too, we participated in a grant program that was established last year by the state of Wyoming. In 117 days, we put up 56 towers and we put up 60 miles of fiber, including fiber in four communities. I think I would like to say we’re getting pretty good at it. It definitely stretched our in-house potential. We lost a little bit of operational focus because we’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off, but-
Craig Corbin:
No doubt.
Brian Worthen:
… you learn a lot of stuff under fire. What’s cool is we’ve actually adopted some of the methods used by some of our contractors during that period last year. But yeah, it’s pretty intense when you’re talking about a state with less than 600,000 people, like Western Colorado in Northwest New Mexico and Southeast Montana. There’s just not a lot of density. And so, you have to be creative with regards to where you place your towers and how you can get fiber to those towers.
Trevor Odom:
Going back to the underserved, kind of like more densely populated areas, I mean, what kind of impacts have you seen, tackling the geographical challenges and areas where obviously this kind of stuff is not acceptable? I mean, what have you seen impact-wise to the communities by offering broadband and connect reliable sources?
Brian Worthen:
It was interesting. We just started seeing some of that prior to COVID. I think the best example is in Ophir, Colorado. If you look it up, you’ll see it’s a wonderful community with great views, not a single gas station, not a single store because it’s just a community of people living there. The community came to us a few years ago and said, “We want to get broadband here.” One of my guys found a fiber line out on the highway. We contracted with the community to bring services in. There was a family that reached out to us after and said, “My son, who has special needs, can now receive treatment three times a week,” versus the one times a week they were having to drive to receive. That was the first time we’d heard something like that.
Brian Worthen:
We often hear of ranchers or people in rural America that were on our network and saying, “Hey. Thanks a lot. You helped me move off satellite.” This is an area where they truly had needs and very few options. In fact, there’s really not a lot of options for them at all. And so, Ophir, Colorado was our pre-COVID pick me up and feel-good moment of, “Man, we have people in this community that really are appreciative and reach out to call us.” Because let’s be honest, we’re in a business where the only time people call you is when they’re having a bad experience or upset. Nobody ever calls and says, “Man, my internet is fantastic today. Thank you.” Ophir was the first place that did that.
Brian Worthen:
And then COVID happens, and our workload was just huge. I mean, we started seeing people migrate off DSL. You’ve got remote workers. You got people educating at home. You got people monitoring health, and all of a sudden their doctors treating them over an iPad, which really wasn’t acceptable practice before COVID and all of a sudden your doctor is willing to treat you over an internet connection. So, it has been very rewarding to myself and my staff to hear those customer stories as they come in that, “Now, I’m able to do this,” or “Now, I don’t have to drive all the way to town to go to the library and download something.” That what’s actually kept us going the last 12 months, is these stories.
Trevor Odom:
I’m seeing some of these challenges, even in the North Georgia area in the corridor and south part of the state as well and just where I live. I mean, is there any plans in the future to venture out more, I guess, east, or are you staying nestled where you are within that state area you’re in now?
Brian Worthen:
We like who we are. We like the area we serve. If we were smart, we’d go into St. George, Utah or Denver or Fort Collins area, but we’re not just in this for the money, right? We want to have an impact and we want to deliver to the community something they don’t even know they need. Just now, there’s the right discussion around this, “What does our community need?” There are people moving in from out of state who are willing to move their business out of a state with fewer access to healthcare. I would answer that by simply saying, we like who we are and we like our service area.
Brian Worthen:
It’d be easy to expand. That was what we learned through Mammoth, is 2009 to 2017, we were expanding big. We’re in Iowa and Minnesota. We had a PoP in Boston. We had a PoP in Atlanta, Georgia at Marquette. we had equipment in Sunnyvale, California. What we found was people were pulling us in all different directions, and that’s a good thing. Obviously, there’s a lot of demand for those services. We were doing something that was pretty unique at the time. But what we saw was the writing on the wall of we’re letting our service change who we are. We actually sold off a lot of our wholesale network in 2017 to get back to who we are.
Brian Worthen:
And so, while that’d be fun to talk about that… I’ve got some friends in Valdosta, Georgia, and so I know some of that territory, and it’d be easy to expand down there because you can buy fiber from anyone. But that’s the point is, how do I have a relationship with the community? And that’s something we’ve just learned in the last couple of years. You can only have so many discussions during the day with a community, with a town council, a city council, accounting commissioner, economic development. You’re your own worst enemy when you try to expand too fast. We learned that the hard way from 2009 to 2017, and we made a decision to change that.
Craig Corbin:
Yeah. You talk about the service area, Brian, and you are serving, I think it’s 117 cities and towns and unincorporated places all over the place. I’m curious about the utilization of the millimeter wave technology that’s enabled the delivery of gigabit speeds in some of the more rural areas that you serve. Talk about that, if you would.
Brian Worthen:
Yeah. I talked a little bit earlier about redundancy and not always can you find a community where there’s an option for a second fiber route. And because we have built broadband with wireless since 2000, 2001, we have a lot of knowledge in-house. And so, putting up a tower and putting up a millimeter wave as a second route out of the community has worked really well. In fact, in one of the communities I’m thinking of right now in Southeast Wyoming, there is only one fiber out into town, or there was. And so, what we did was we put up a millimeter-wave to take 10 gigs out a different direction. It was the way to provide redundancy and backup in that community because when you sell the community, you’re selling to the town and the county and their 911 center and their sheriff and their police. There’s a certain amount of redundancy expected.
Brian Worthen:
You can’t go into a town and say, “I don’t want to take your business because I have to have more uptime.” You want to have the uptime, and millimeter-wave has done that. I think the first place we installed a secluded link specifically for millimeter-wave was in Durango, Colorado. What was cool about that is we started using that for redundancy. It’s got a shorter hop distance. You can only get it out there reliably to about four miles. We got a couple of shots that are a little longer, up to nine and a half, but you want to make sure that you build it reliably. But it’s opened up the door for us to get the redundancy in diverse routes into communities that have never had those before. And so, I think we’ve got probably 20 or 30 communities, where the only redundant option is us using the millimeter-wave, and it’s a very important tool in the chest.
Craig Corbin:
You talked earlier, Brian, about being in a group that is willing to roll up their sleeves and do whatever’s necessary to get the job done. That’s been a big part of the success of your organization. I know that over the years, you talk about a quarter of a century of service. There have to be some stories that are probably a little bit humorous and that you remember one in particular that I think you had mentioned before was one case of having to move your core PoP there in Wyoming. Does that ring a bell? Anything?
Brian Worthen:
Yeah. That one’s funny. We actually have a phrase around here called punk rock. When we’re really ecstatic or we’ve accomplished something, we use that phrase, but I’ll give you the background of it. Jeremy, our founder and I, were moving our core one night. These aren’t the dial-up days. This is pre-2002-ish. We went to Casper. Casper, Wyoming is our core. Most of our customer base was in the Gillette area, but Casper is our core because that’s where we could get affordable internet. And so, all of our core routers or switches were there. We sent out a message to all of our customers saying, “Hey, on X night, from this time to this time, you’re not going to have internet because we’ve got to take down our core and move it.”
Brian Worthen:
We were moving it over to a site that has better redundancy and better fiber options, which happened to be right across the street from our existing location. So, we went down and we started prepping. This is a pretty significant move. We had to have our long-haul carrier on the phone. We had to have the CO tech on the phone to move all these dial-up T1s, DS3s. It’s old-school stuff. We had a DS3 for frame relay, and we had to move that. We started, I think, around 11:00 or 12:00 at night and we finished… And so, what was happening is we literally were paralleling down equipment, taking out of our old building and putting on a hand cart and just carting it across the street and taking it upstairs to the new PoP location. Each time we crossed the street with more equipment, it started snowing a little more and a little more, but willing to make two or three trips.
Brian Worthen:
And then about 4:00 in the morning, we start wrapping up and we start seeing people come online. We’re exhausted, of course. We go outside and there’s almost a foot of snow out on the ground. We didn’t take a change of clothes. We weren’t planning to spend the night. We’re going to just power through it and drive back, being young and dumb. And so, we decided, “Well, we’re going to have to stay.” And so, we went to Kmart and bought a change of clothes and some toiletries. Jeremy bought this shirt that has two fists on it, and it says punk rock.
Craig Corbin:
I love it.
Brian Worthen:
That’s our punk rock story. So if you go through our office, there are punk rock concerts on the wall. There are pictures of that. It all stems from this story because it emphasizes that roll up your sleeves and just get it done. Most people would have recreated the PoP with duplicate equipment. We didn’t have the money. We didn’t have the financial resources. We didn’t have the ability to do that. And so, powering down equipment and going through the stress of hoping it comes back up on the other side of the street, then topping it off with a snowstorm, it’s just a story that really my employees connect with because they often hear Jeremy and I say, “Punk Rock.” It’s almost a sign of accomplishment here. So, it’s a fun story.
Craig Corbin:
I love it.
Trevor Odom:
Yeah, I love hearing that. Brian, it just exuberates the entrepreneurial spirit. You hear your stories like this all the time of the CEOs and successful business owners. I guess my childhood flashing back of hearing Kmart and dial-up as a reference. Just a curiosity, what was your first aha moment when venturing into this business to where it was like, “This can be something. I got something here.”
Brian Worthen:
So we got involved in the business, I was actually in a family business before this, and Jeremy and his partner had started this up. I went to high school with them. They didn’t know much about business. They’re tech guys. They wanted the internet for free. That was their whole goal. And so, when I started seriously looking at it, they were telling me, “Man, we can do this SS7 and we can do PRI offload.” These were all phrases back in the day that were just really exciting for me because I was new to the business. But I got in the business looking at the potential savings at rolling out at SS7.
Brian Worthen:
Within a few months of that, we scrapped it. We even had our ALinks up and got our connectivity in to start rolling out at SS7, and started looking at vendors and whatnot as far as some of the equipment. I literally looked at that and said, “We can’t do this.” And so, we want to totally different path. We went the path of cost savings and recontracting. I wouldn’t even say that’s my aha moment. This business is about change and adaptivity and your willingness to move. And so, we’ve changed ourselves six or seven times now.
Brian Worthen:
My aha moment was 2017 when I said, “I don’t like who we are. I don’t like who we’re getting to be.” It was big sales, big trips, dog and pony show. I love selling. I actually liked that part of the business a lot, but what we found ourselves doing was focusing on something that didn’t benefit our home community that we’re in or something that didn’t benefit the communities where our employees reside. And so, the aha moment was saying, “Hey, let’s not worry about where people want to take us.” Because you’re getting pulled in different directions, like Silly Putty, and somebody to say, “Hey, would you go into Nebraska? Would you go here?” The aha moment was we could be who we wanted to be. And so, we’ve invested that way. We’ve invested in the way that helps us be who we want to be.
Craig Corbin:
That’s a great mindset. Brian, greatly appreciate so much your time and sharing the story. The last question as we wind down our visit today, we’re fond of referring to this as the back to the future question. When you look at having been existence for 25 years and all that’s been accomplished, is there any point in that time that you would love to hop into a time machine, go back and whisper something in your ear that would have changed the course or the timeframe for Visionary or Mammoth?
Brian Worthen:
Yeah, I think that’s an obvious answer. I would have told myself to build more fiber. We didn’t have the financial means. We grew on cash all the way up to about 2014, just purely on cash. We tried to be responsible. We’re from a blue-collar community. And so, we didn’t leverage ourselves. If I had my druthers and I was able in hindsight to go back and give myself advice, it would be to build fiber early. We’re late to the game. We went the route of building a lot of microwave, which has a quicker ROI, like 18 months. If we just plunked down money and leverage ourselves a little bit for fiber, we’d be in a much better position to help the communities we’re in. So that’s what I would tell myself.
Craig Corbin:
You’re doing such phenomenal work for so many people, so many companies in such a wide area. Can’t thank you enough for what you and your team are doing. Greatly appreciate being able to listen to the story. We look forward to the next opportunity to be able to check back in with you down the road and learn what else has developed with Mammoth Networks and Visionary Communications. Brian, thanks so much for your time today.
Brian Worthen:
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Craig Corbin:
Absolutely. That’s going to wrap up this edition of The Broadband Bunch. On behalf of Trevor, Brian, and everyone here, thanks for letting us be a part of your day. We’ll see you next time right here on The Broadband Bunch. So long, everyone.
