- Wecom is building a repeatable operating model for rural fiber expansion
- Broadband has become critical infrastructure that customers expect to work 24/7
- Operational Sovereignty doesn't require owning everything — but it does require maintaining control
I recently sat down with Rachel Solomon, the new CEO of Wecom Fiber, and the conversation went somewhere I wasn't entirely expecting.
Solomon has spent 26 years in the communications industry, much of it working for large operators, most recently Comcast. She has now moved to a much smaller regional provider that is undertaking an ambitious fiber expansion across rural Arizona.
That makes Wecom an interesting test case for something I've been thinking about a lot: why some communications providers seem able to turn successful deployments into repeatable growth while others remain trapped in an endless cycle of pilots and bespoke projects.
The answer, according to Solomon, isn't necessarily better technology.
It's repeatability.
Building a machine
One thing Solomon immediately noticed at Wecom was the speed at which a smaller company can operate.
“We're making decisions very quickly,” she told me. “We have the flexibility to make decisions in the same day and move forward.”
What Wecom can learn from larger operators, she said, is discipline, rigor and accountability.
The objective is to combine the two.
“We're building a machine that's a repeatable, scalable operating model that we can take all over Northern and Western Arizona.”
That becomes harder when you're building across multiple jurisdictions. Wecom is already working across eight counties, each potentially bringing different DOT requirements, permitting procedures and inspection workflows.
Internally, Solomon is trying to standardize engineering, design, construction and quality processes.
The danger of getting that wrong is wonderfully simple.
“You make a mistake in one area and you repeat it a thousand times, now you've got to go back and fix a thousand mistakes," Solomon told me.
Interestingly, she agreed when I suggested that the principal obstacle to scaling isn't necessarily selecting equipment or deploying the latest AI technology. It's dealing with the variability of actually getting infrastructure built.
The goal, she said, is an operating model that is repeatable “from city to city, town to town, jurisdiction to jurisdiction.”
Broadband becomes critical infrastructure
That matters because what Wecom is building is no longer merely a broadband service.
Once customers have reliable fiber, expectations change very quickly. Connectivity becomes infrastructure they assume will always be there.
Solomon doesn't believe operators can charge extra for that reliability.
“I don't think you charge more for something that is expected,” she said. Customers expect the network to operate “24-7, 365,” regardless of monsoons, storms, weekends or holidays.
Then she gave me an eloquent description of broadband's changing role:
“Broadband fiber, it's become as in demand as air. You take a breath, air's there.”
“We're building an infrastructure that people expect to be there no matter what.”
Sovereignty without owning everything
That led us into Operational Sovereignty.
Modern operators don't control everything required to deliver their services. They depend upon backbone providers and other partners. So how does an operator remain in control of the outcome?
For Wecom, a large part of the answer is redundancy.
Its networks are built in rings, so if one side is cut, traffic can continue over the other without customers even knowing something happened.
“You can't just depend on plan A to work because it usually doesn't,” Solomon said. “We're looking at plan A, B, C, D, E.”
The objective is to prepare both the network and the people operating it for whatever happens next.
That is an important distinction.
Wecom owns the fiber it puts into the ground and its electronics. But when backbone providers form part of a network ring, those companies may own their portions of the infrastructure.
Operational Sovereignty therefore doesn't necessarily mean owning everything. It means retaining sufficient control and resilience to keep operating across an ecosystem you don't entirely own.
Making rural fiber pay
The final piece is economics.
Wecom has won a $195 million BEAD award to serve approximately 66,000 homes, which Solomon says is the largest BEAD award in Arizona.
She doesn't regard subsidy as a permanent business model. It is one-time funding that “opens the gate” to places Wecom might otherwise have been unable to reach.
What happens afterwards depends on conventional business discipline: penetration rates, activated customers, products, services and cost per passing.
Solomon believes demand in rural communities has been underestimated. During one field visit, a woman chased the Wecom team down the street to tell them that getting broadband had changed her life because she could finally FaceTime her grandson.
It's a small story that illustrates a much bigger one.
The communications industry already knows how to build extraordinarily capable networks. The next challenge is learning how to build them repeatedly, economically and resiliently enough that the people who depend upon them can simply assume they will always be there.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.