Broadweave's Busy Summer

Until This Year, most people probably had never heard of Broadweave Networks. But after a particularly active summer, the company is now poised to become one of the largest non-Bell providers of fiber to the premises in the country. And it's just getting warmed up.

“We'll be actively pursuing other acquisitions,” said Steve Christensen, Broadweave's CEO, after the company had announced plans to buy iProvo, the municipal FTTP network in Provo, Utah. “There are 41 muni FTTP networks out there.”

Still in his 30s today, Christensen founded Broadweave in 1999 with colleagues from Novell, an enterprise software firm in Provo that he started to work for while still in law school. Robert Frankenburg, another Broadweave founder, was Novell's former CEO as well as an AOL board member during that company's meteoric rise in the late '90s and a Hewlett-Packard executive since the late 1960s. Ty Mattingly, another Broadweave founder, left Novell to co-found Novonyx, a Netscape-related software startup that he later sold to Novell. Fraser Bullock, co-founder of venture capital firms Bain Capital and Sorenson Capital (a Broadweave investor), also founded Alpine Consolidated, which focused on business mergers, and helped organize the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. While never at Novell, Bullock shares the company's Utah roots. Like Mattingly, Bullock attended Brigham Young University, where Christensen was once a halfback for the Cougars.

Broadweave began by deploying triple-play services over FTTP in a single master planned community (MPC) in Lehi, Utah — just 15 miles northwest of Provo and 30 miles south of Salt Lake City — that is projected to eventually reach 8000 homes. It would be six years before the company won another MPC fiber contract, but the pace picked up thereafter. Within a year of signing its second contract, Broadweave secured contracts or letters of intent from 20 MPCs — 12 from outside Utah — entailing roughly half a million homes. Soon the company was registering to do business in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.

Before the housing market collapsed, Broadweave was chasing a booming market. Even a few years ago, 40% of the MPCs under construction picked FTTP, according to research firm RVA. And by 2011, that number was projected by ABI Research to reach 70%.