Fiber Won O
n June 1, Dustin Brown opened his third business in Lawrence. Already an established wedding photographer and software consultant who operated out of a studio just north of the Kansas River, he started Prime Edits with a simple concept. Subscribers would upload raw photos, and Brown would edit the images and beam them back. The business plan was complicated by Brown’s slow Internet connection. Like most people in Lawrence, Brown was a WideOpenWest customer. The company — usually referred to as WOW — was the college town’s dominant cable and Internet provider. A typical photo package coming Brown’s way might total 80 gigabytes. Downloading files of that bulk took awhile, and getting them back to clients ate up even more time. “It was taking half a day to upload a wedding,” Brown tells The Pitch. Given that his business model hinged on editing 10 weddings a day, this was a problem. “The math on it just kind of freaked us out.” Brown hoped to secure a fiber-optic connection from WOW and pay a business rate. The company’s offer to Prime Edits: a budget-busting $1,200 a month. He considered loading photos onto a drive and hiring a courier to make daily trips to Kansas
City’s Startup Village, which enjoys a connection to Google’s gigabit fiber. But a friend suggested an alternative: Connect with Wicked Broadband, a startup trying to cement a place in Lawrence’s fiber scene. Wicked Broadband’s history in Lawrence goes back nine years and includes previous corporate names. It’s run largely by a Lawrence native named Josh Montgomery, who wired Brown’s building with a fiber line that ran about 100 times faster than his cable connection allowed (an advantage that Google subscribers in Kansas City had realized for more than a year). “Honestly, it went from my editors saying I’m going to leave for the day and hoping it [the upload] wouldn’t break in the night to not hearing about it anymore,” Brown says. Montgomery says he wants to put gigabit fiber in every home and business in Lawrence through an open-access network — meaning that anyone, not just Wicked Broadband, could lease fiber from Montgomery’s infrastructure and offer Internet service or use it for something else, such as video security. It’s a pioneering idea but one that carries some risk to Lawrence taxpayers: Montgomery has asked
the city to guarantee a $300,000 loan. He has been waiting more than a year for the Lawrence City Commission to give him an answer. Part of why he’s still waiting is Mike Bosch.
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Two ultra-small startups duel to sell ultrafast broadband to Lawrence. By Steve Vockrodt
osch struck all the right chords October 7 when selling his own fiber-optic business plan to the Lawrence City Commission. Before a packed meeting chamber, he deftly played the earnest small-town startup seeking the city’s approval to do business. “I love raising my family in a small town in Baldwin City,” Bosch told Lawrence’s five-member commission. He explained how his company, RG Fiber, could bring high-speed Internet to Lawrence without asking much in return. All he wanted was access to the city’s rights of way, to lease just a few of the unused fiberoptic strands that the city had buried years ago, and perhaps some land at VenturePark for future office space. He didn’t want any of the city’s money, he said. He also used the moment to take a shot at Wicked Broadband for requesting a loan guarantee. “I want to be very clear in making the statement that we’re asking you not to fund our competitor, Wicked Fiber,” Bosch said. “We continued on page 6
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