Tough enough

Cutthroat was founded by Roger Lang, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought a Montana cattle ranch and found he couldn't get the broadband service he wanted.

“A lot of East Coast and Silicon Valley guys were buying starter castles or starter nations up here and went looking for broadband and found it wasn't there,” Graetz said. Ironically, Cutthroat still doesn't provide broadband to Lang's 18,700-acre Sun Ranch in Montana's Madison Valley.

The real-estate boom helped fuel Cutthroat's Montana growth, and the company also expanded out of state, in part through a series of acquisitions.

“It's very tough to make a go of it up there,” Graetz said. “We actually have a lot of competition. There have been many companies who have come in with very significant plans. They have spent a ton of money and then realized it was harder to do than it looks.”

Graetz came to the company in 2002 and served as vice president of network operations and chief technology officer before taking over from Lang as CEO. It was Graetz's decision to move the company away from using unlicensed spectrum to the more reliable licensed bands at 23 GHz and 18 GHz, where Cutthroat uses Dragonwave AirPair 100s and 200s. In addition, the company uses 6 GHz microwave links to interconnect markets and will use DS-3s purchased on a wholesale basis as backups.

“Typically, a market is made up of a set of geographically diverse Juniper Networks core routers meshed together with fiber optic circuits as well as high-capacity wireless in the 60 GHz range, so we have true independence from the [public switched network] and carriers,” Graetz said.

Moving outward from that core, Cutthroat uses the AirPair devices at 18 GHz and 23 GHz to deliver up to 370 Mb/s of service. “They will hit tower sites dispersed from a valley floor or up on hilltops, connecting routing gear from Cisco [Systems] and Juniper and plugging into one of two last-mile platforms, either from Aperto Networks or additional Dragonwaves that are point-to-point networks,” he said. “All of this is tied together by self-healing fiber optic rings that link all of the markets.” The company has a set of network management systems from Solar Winds, as well as vendor-specific NMS.

“The typical situation is: A customer orders service; we roll a truck, put up the antenna, calibrate with the network operations center, turn up the circuit and walk away,” Graetz said. “Because it is so simple and so much of the work is done by the equipment and the equipment is so reliable, we can serve our customers with a small number of people per market.”

An 800-node network in Montana is maintained by three to five people, not only for the sake of cost-effectiveness but also for practicality.

“There are enormous temperature swings in the areas we serve,” Graetz said. “In Washington, it can be 13° below in the winter and 105° in the summer. You have to have fault tolerance built into whatever equipment you deploy under those conditions. The equipment has to be fully managed and operated so you don't have to go to the site to deal with it because in some cases, you won't be able to get to it. For parts of our network, we finish our maintenance in October and don't go back until April.”

The company also had to be positioned to absorb long sales cycles and the complexity of acquiring tower real estate. “You have to make investments you didn't expect, like backup power, extremely reliable systems — you can't get in here on the cheap,” he said.

Cutthroat predominantly competes with larger incumbents, including Qwest Communications, as well as AT&T and Sprint in the long-haul markets. Up until now the company has been privately funded, although it is starting to take advantage of Rural Utility Service E-rate and M-rate funding.

The company continues to explore new wireless options, Graetz said.

“We are in the process of applying for 3.65 space, which is a new band being made available for non-exclusive, near-license operation,” he said. “We are going to start using that in areas where the unlicensed last mile isn't working as well.”