Wyoming-Based Visionary Broadband Keeps Growing; Buys Colorado Internet Company

Visionary Broadband is one of the few companies that has been connecting small rural locations in the Intermountain West long before it was hip.

Wednesday, the company that started in a Gillette, Wyoming, basement with three-tech savvy friends working out a way to get better Internet, announced 15 new projects that are going to connect more than 5,000 people in small communities like Centennial and Glendo to high-speed Internet. It also bought a Colorado internet provider to expand its regional reach.

Visionary Broadband CEO Brian Worthen said the projects are just a continuation of the vision that started in that Gillette basement back in the days of dial-up internet.

“Back then, you could be spending $100, $200, $300 a month to get connected to the Internet in rural areas at dial-up speeds,” he told Cowboy State Daily. 

Within a few days of solving that problem and building themselves a better mousetrap, the trio found themselves with requests from others who also wanted more affordable Internet services, including about 60 accounts for the local school district.

“That’s when they realized they’d created a business,” Worthen said. 

Today, however, the company is no longer small. It’s grown big by serving small, and is now set to get even bigger.

A Multi-Pronged Push

Visionary’s latest push in the Intermountain West is multi-pronged. 

First, there’s the 15 projects totaling $26.6 million that will bring high-speed Internet to several rural areas that lack adequate services now.

That’s happening under the much larger $111 million Connect Wyoming initiative, which is under the umbrella of the Wyoming Business Council’s Broadband Office.

Concurrent with that, though, the company has also just acquired Colorado-based Aristata. That acquisition is not just about expanding its footprint in the Colorado area. It’s also about adding skilled professionals to the team.

“In this business, there’s not a college program that produces broadband builders who we can go hire and recruit from college,” Worthen said. “So, we have to be creative on how we add to our staff.”

In Wyoming, that’s typically meant hiring people and training them for one to four years before getting the benefit of that training.

With the Aristata acquisition, Visionary is able to acquire already trained people, while also bolting on territory that’s adjacent to areas the company already serves.

Aristata, meanwhile, will be able to provide better service to its customers, making the whole thing a win-win-win.

Taking On The Tough Hills

Aristata is serving an area with challenging terrain, but it won’t be the first time Visionary has tackled a tough climb in the Rockies.

Take as an example the tiny town of Marble, Colorado, with just 134 people and 413 homes and businesses — if the surrounding area is included.

Those who live in and around Marble enjoy spectacular terrain, but it comes at the cost of challenging construction for just about everything, even simple power poles.

But those challenges don’t deter Visionary Broadband. Its $890,000 project in Marble not only brought first-rate Internet service to an area not likely to be served anytime soon by any other service provider, but it filled in a missing link for the entire Crystal River Valley.

“What we have found is the people who are willing to do the work, and the people who are willing to roll up their sleeves are getting the work, whether it’s grants or whether it’s just taking on an area that’s never been served before,” Worthen said. “What we do is very Wyoming-like, where we’re just going to roll up our sleeves and get the work done.”

Breaking Down Monopolies

Bringing broadband to challenging areas will continue to be a focus for Visionary, Worthen said, but the company is also seeing opportunities to really build on the backbone of what it’s already accomplished in outlying areas around larger communities.

“If you look forward to now, we’ve actually taken our employees who built broadband in the toughest areas of Wyoming and applied that to city and town limits,” Worthen said. “We have been around forever doing broadband before the phone company, before the cable company. 

“And we were just fine with being relegated to the county area. But we’re realizing we’ve got a skilled staff and we can compete right in downtown, and that’s what we’ve chosen to do.”

That has the Wyoming company now laying fiber in larger communities like Cheyenne and Casper, Worthen said, offering advertised speeds of 1 and 2 gigs.

That may not be the fastest advertised, Worthen acknowledged, but the infrastructure the company is laying has been made with the long haul in mind. It is capable of scaling to 10 gigs when the time is right.

“So, we can at some point in the future when we say we want to be a 10 gig provider, we can just go and change the settings that everybody’s connected to now,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

In the future, Worthen is envisioning the stranglehold that telephone and cable companies have had on the broadband market being broken, and it’s his own Wyoming company that has been instrumental in making it happen. 

“And it’s not going to be driven by the stock market or people in a room six states over,” Worthen said. “It’s people like myself. And for me personally, I believe I’m gong to be making a local impact and be out in the community seeing that local impact.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.