Ripple Fiber CEO Highlights Challenges, Opportunities for Small ISPs
Smaller ISPs and new entrants like North Carolina-based Ripple Fiber are finding ways to compete in a rapidly evolving broadband marketplace, CEO Greg Wilson said Wednesday during a Fiber Broadband Association webinar. While deployment remains costly, he said using data to strategically target markets and partnering with local communities are helping smaller providers overcome challenges.
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Wilson highlighted the role of automated software in filling gaps in broadband deployment and affordability. It's "really about plugging these holes," he said. "Very quickly we picked up that there was a massive need for fiber and bandwidth" in the fiber-to-the-business ecosystem and low-income communities.
Despite these strategies, new entrants still face barriers. Ripple’s first fiber rollout in a small North Carolina location in 2021 was "difficult and expensive," Wilson said, adding that things that were "really difficult early on became moats later on." Within one month of the company's rollout, Wilson said, its service territory was “overbuilt by Google Fiber and Windstream,” and it “had to go and sell pretty hard" to prove that its business model worked. Ripple’s experience reflects broader hurdles for new entrants nationwide, he noted.
The broadband market has "evolved pretty quickly," with many different players now competing for service territory, Wilson said. "We had to become a lot more data-driven in our approach." He said his company augmented "industry-available datasets" to identify market densities and the number of locations within certain cohorts that have fiber passing locations to expand its fiber footprint.
ISPs also face some challenges with municipalities before they can deploy fiber, Wilson said. "They're trying to protect the infrastructure." He emphasized the need for ISPs to be able to project-manage at a regional level, noting that "in every town that you go to, the challenges are different." Wilson added that Ripple's operating model centers on identifying the most efficient ways to roll out fiber in smaller pockets with fewer passings than urban areas.
Like the availability of new infrastructure, funding hurdles are among the challenges facing local governments. Some officials raised concerns about the issue last month at the National Association of Telecom Officers and Advisors' annual conference (see 2508200054).
These challenges are compounded by the U.S. broadband market’s retail-focused environment, Wilson said, which largely revolves around providers managing infrastructure and customer operations. Building to scale can be like "trying to get a train moving ... all the carriages have to move simultaneously."
At the same time, Wilson noted that retail models have their benefits: "You can get features and product granularity to the clients a lot quicker," while in open-access markets, it can take "six months or a year just to launch a new product to the market."