Vyve Broadband expanded its commercial fiber service to 25 cities across 11 different states, as part of a bid to feed what Chief Commercial Officer Edwin Butler characterized as an “insatiable appetite for bandwidth” in non-urban markets.
Founded in 2012, Vyve Broadband originally covered an eight-state footprint in the South and Central U.S. It was acquired by Mega Broadband Investments in 2019, which subsequently united its entire portfolio of rural broadband companies (including Eagle Broadband and Northland Communications) under the Vyve brand in 2020. Today, Vyve Broadband serves over 240,000 residential customers and around 18,000 commercial customers across 16 states.
While the operator is continually expanding its residential footprint, Butler said it’s aggressively leaning into the enterprise segment.
“We’ve had a double-digit growth expectation for the last three years and we anticipate this year being really the same, so somewhere between 17 and 20 percent from a [commercial] revenue standpoint,” Butler said. While Vyve initially targeted small and medium businesses, its ambitions have grown over the past three years to include mid-sized enterprises as well as carrier and wholesale customers.
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“We’ve really tried to cast our net pretty widely,” Butler said, noting it is working to capitalize on opportunities to serve schools, medical facilities, financial institutions, carriers and tower companies. He added “60, 65% of our growth [in the commercial segment] is coming from the enterprise and carrier space.”
In terms of competition, Butler said Vyve is up against traditional ILECs like AT&T, Frontier Communications and Centurylink as well as fiber overbuilders. Its strategy to win against these players is to go after underserved non-urban markets as well as areas where advanced services like SIP, hosted voice and cloud solutions are scarce.
“Most of these markets have had to sacrifice quality of service. They’ve not gotten a lot of attention, they’ve not had a lot of options that have been available to them, their speed choices have suffered,” Butler explained. “Just because one elects to either live or work in a non-urban market, they shouldn’t have to sacrifice getting high-quality, high-capacity technology services.”
Its more than two dozen new commercial fiber cities include markets in California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Wyoming. All of these will have access to Vyve’s portfolio of symmetric fiber broadband options, which range from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, as well as networking and storage options like cloud and SD-WAN capabilities.
“These are very commonplace offerings if you’re in Dallas, in Chicago, in Charlotte, but if you’re in some of the communities that we serve, you may not have these same sort of options,” Butler concluded. “We want to be the speed leader both commercially and residentially in all the markets we serve.”