It all started in the spring of 2005. We found our dream home; a beautiful craftsman home on 5+ wooded acres just outside of Granite Falls. We were attracted to the friendly, open community, the excellent schools, the privacy, and of course a price that couldn't be beat. I was assured by the real estate agent that there were multiple options for high speed internet available at the home and was even told that the previous owner had cable service. This was a huge factor for us, as my wife and I are both internet professionals. I had an internet business with offices in Bellevue and my wife was doing advertising and marketing work for a number of high profile clients from home. In addition, we were just starting up a new interactive marketing firm that would rely heavily on reliable high speed internet service.

Many of you know how the rest of the story goes, because you went through the same thing. We moved in and started calling the internet "providers" in the area. After spending a couple of months commuting daily to Bellevue and scouring the DSL, Cable and T1 providers, we came to the final realization that the only option for internet service (other than dial-up,) was Satellite Internet.

So I called up the Satellite Company and shelled out about $1,000 to get set up. It got us online, but for just under $100 per month for the business class service it just wasn't working out. The speed was intolerable and the latency prevented me from doing any secure remote work for my clients via VPN. The latency also prevented any sort of online gaming, streaming video etc. Sometimes it would time out just downloading a security update and we would need to start the entire download over again.

The final coup-de-grace came in the spring of 2006. After scraping by for the past year on a signal that barely allowed us to send email, the entire Satellite network from this particular provider suffered a nationwide outage for 3 or 4 days. Apparently, bad weather on the east coast had crippled communications from their network center to the Satellites, so none of the customers had service. In addition, they suffered some hardware damage. The storms on the east coast cleared and they repaired their network equipment, but I still had no service. My neighbor’s satellite connection was working, but mine was still offline. Two weeks of calls to tech support and countless headaches later, I was told that the equipment on my dish was somehow damaged by the feedback when they turned their system back on.

That was it, I'd had enough.

Here I am, owner of 3 successful technology businesses, in a high end home filled with computers, building networks and writing software for thousands of users, and I can't get reliable internet service? There had to be a better way, and if there wasn't, well I was going to make one! I had already been scouring the internet and technology periodicals for the past year trying to find a better form of service to my home, and had stumbled upon a few useful tidbits. Apparently, there were villages in Africa and remote Islands in the South Pacific that had High Speed internet. I found out about a company that was providing High Speed service to the troops in Iraq and about a massive rescue effort in the south for Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of people mobilized the day after Katrina hit and managed to blanket Louisiana with secure wireless broadband that was capable of carrying data, video and voice feeds for the entire area.

The gears in my head started turning...

There had to be a way I could leverage this technology to bring service to my home. I kept asking myself, "Why hasn't someone already done this?" It turns out they had. I came to find out that there were hundreds of "Wireless Internet Service Providers," (or "WISPs" for short,) across the nation, but none that could service Granite Falls and surrounding areas.

How is it that I could have searched the Internet for a year, made countless phone calls and inquiries, and not have found out about this sooner? It seems that these providers aren't advertising themselves in the right ways. They call themselves a "WISP," advertise "WiFi" service, limit customer speeds to top speeds lower than Satellite, charge a hundred dollars a month or more and back their systems on a shared DSL, Cable or T1 line.

Now to me, when I hear "WiFi," the first thing I think of is the $50 wireless router I have sitting in my closet to network my home computers. The thing reaches like 3 rooms max. I don't associate that with last mile service to the home, especially when the "last mile" is more like 4 miles. Either that or I picture one of the notoriously slow and congested hotspots that are set up at the local Libraries and coffee shops. Neither one qualifies in my mind as a high speed internet service.

I started researching the equipment and technology to see why remote villages in Africa could get 10 meg service but outlying towns in the US were stuck with 756k WiFi. It pretty much comes down to the quality of equipment and the business plan. Some of the gear out there, the less expensive stuff, can only push 1 meg or less out to a customer. Other gear can hit 5 meg, or even 10 meg, but the companies operating the network know that they can get away with chocking it down to 756k and charging (in some cases) hundreds of dollars per month.

Now to me, that doesn't seem like a business plan with much longevity. What happens when the phone company finally brings in DSL? Everyone on the WISP system will jump ship and the business will crumble. Not a good idea. So I gathered my trusted business partners; my wife (a highly awarded internet advertiser,) my father in law (an expert network engineer,) my mother in law (to manage the books and accounting,) and my uncle in law (to secure any additional banking and financing.) We put together a long term business plan that would allow us to bring super high speed internet service to the home or office for $39.95 per month. And with speeds that blew even cable internet away. 8-10 meg per second can only be beat by fiber optic internet. We decided to use all high end "carrier class" equipment, to back our network directly on a redundant, dedicated fiber optic connection to the internet, and to build in layers of redundancy to maximize quality of service. It would cost us well over $100,000 and take a year before we saw break even, but the financial plan was solid and it had good long term potential.

I sold my portion of one of my other businesses to my partners in that venture and my in-laws sold a house. Our other partner secured fair terms and banking, threw in a bunch more capital and we set to work on Thunderbird!

We sent Dennis down to the manufacturer for factory training and certification, Alysa went to work on creating the Thunderbird brand and image, Trish and Patrick crunched the numbers and planned out the budget and I pulled together the vendors and researched our market area.

Six months later we were ready to demo the system and do some initial marketing at the Railroad Days festival in Granite Falls.

 Now we have nearly 100 customers in the area and are ahead of our goals. We expect to reach our break even point on target with our projections and expand into other nearby areas. We have been very well received in the area; many of our customers continue to send us referrals and rave reviews. We are now setting to work on giving back to the community, exploring options for WiFi service and hotspots in town as well as building out our new community portal which will have a local business and services directory as well as public forums freely available online. Check out the community tab at the top of our page, or go to http://www.thunderbirdbroadband.com/Pilchuck to watch it grow. If you are interested in contributing news, articles or other content, or want a page hosted on the portal that showcases your business or service, send me an email at aaron@thunderbirdbroadband.com .

I have a bunch of photos of the tower, even a couple with me up in the high rigging gear mounting our radios, I'll try to post them in the next day or so. Also, were partnering with a local family to start a Thunderbird Broadband branch in Tucson Arizona, so watch for updates regarding that as well. World conquest is not far off ;)

Until next time,

Aaron