JAB: bridging the digital divide.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: BUSINESS AS USUAL - JAB Wireless Inc. - Dialogue with Jack Koo - Interview

WITH MORE THAN 750 EMPLOYEES AND annual revenues topping $100 million, JAB Wireless Inc. might be the biggest Colorado company you've never heard of.

Founded in 2006, the Englewood-based firm has become the largest fixed-wireless broadband service provider in the country, with more than 175,000 customers in 15 states, including 35,000 customers in Colorado. Its primary services are high-speed Internet access and digital telephone, mainly in underserved rural and exurban areas.

Put simply, JAB is in the business of bridging the digital divide--that gap between the country's high-speed Internet haves and have-nots.

JAB President and CEO Jack Koo describes the privately held company's business model as a "donut strategy" that eschews major city centers and focuses on areas difficult for cable companies to serve profitably. "Broadband service is good in metropolitan Denver," he explains, "but as you get into the fringes of these networks, our competitors' service capabilities get worse. That's really our sweet spot."

In Colorado, where the company operates under the name Skybeam, JAB's footprint covers the 1-25 corridor from Pueblo to Cheyenne. To the west, it serves the mountain communities along 1-70.

"Probably the biggest advantage we have is that we don't build a dedicated network like cable does," says Koo, himself a cable industry veteran. "Our network footprint is defined one tower site at a time, so we don't have the same 'build it and hope they come' mentality. We can focus our network investments where either demand or need is the highest, so we have a lot of selectivity with that. Not only is the technology considerably cheaper, it also can be managed much more capital-efficiently. That's really why we are so much better suited to serve rural America."

Koo points out that DSL still has about a 50 percent market share in rural America, but he says, "That's diminishing every single day. DSL faces the same challenges as cable does in trying to upgrade its networks and edge out its footprint, in that they need to have fiber deeper and deeper into their network to increase their capacities."

Koo has a long history in telecommunications, having previously co-founded FrontierVision Partners, a consolidator of cable TV...