A Tower and a Dream: How ProTek Built a Rural FTTH Network
The problem
In 2014, Cam McCurdy bought a house south of Marion, Illinois, and hit the same wall as everyone around him: rural internet that didn’t work. He and his wife ran a custom metal design business, and the online storefront was most of their income. So he asked on Facebook whether anyone else had the problem, and whether they’d chip in on a $500-a-month commercial internet connection. Roughly a hundred neighbors answered overnight.
By early 2016 there was a tower in his backyard and a hundred customers on fixed wireless internet. Demand kept outrunning the network. Every new subscriber was another connection competing for the same spectrum, and the towers could only reach so far into the places that needed service most. ProTek didn’t need a bigger wireless network. They needed a different solution.
Fiber to the home (FTTH) was the answer, and it changed what ProTek had to be good at. A fiber build is hundreds of part numbers — fiber optic cable, connectors, terminals, splice closures, vaults, and handholes — that have to work together, arrive in the right sequence, and survive going into southern Illinois ground, which is rock where you’d rather have dirt. ProTek had no engineering team, no materials plan, and no fiber optic supplier deep enough to tell them what they didn’t know to ask. They needed a partner before they needed product. That’s where Millennium came in.
A 200-passing FTTH pilot and a head start on fiber network design
Before there was a grant, there was a pilot. ProTek funded 200 passings out of their own pocket in 2019, for the express purpose of making their mistakes early. They had no fiber engineering capability, so Millennium Geospatial handled the fiber network design for them — OSP engineering, splice diagrams down to bill of materials, and the decisions ProTek didn’t yet know were decisions. That pilot is still in the ground. It runs about 70% adoption today, with a competitor now in the market.
It also proved the model worked. What it couldn’t prepare them for was the supply chain.