As money flows in for broadband builds across the country, regional service provider Dobson Fiber is pushing to secure a first-mover advantage in parts of the South Central U.S. where larger competitors might not be looking.
Founded in Oklahoma in 1936 as the Dobson Telephone Company, the operator later split its business into wireless and wireline divisions. The former was sold off to AT&T in 2007 in a deal worth $5.1 billion, leaving leadership to focus on building up the latter in the years that followed. The company, which was formerly known as Dobson Technologies before rebranding in February of this year, now has a footprint that spans Oklahoma, northern Texas and Arkansas. Matt Milliron, Dobson Fiber’s Chief Revenue Officer, told Fierce it provides a mix of wholesale, fiber-to-the-tower, enterprise and residential connectivity.
Though a fiber land grab is underway, Milliron said other players seem to overlook the parts of the country Dobson serves.
“There is a massive addressable market here and it’s in areas of high growth. And I don’t think people recognize just how many businesses and homes are in and around our serviceable footprint,” he stated. “It typically gets glossed over with the East Coast or West Coast or some of your major markets. But when you really start thinking about the migration of people, we’ve seen just an incredible growth rate in and around Oklahoma City recently.”
On the enterprise side, Milliron said it competes with mainstream competitors AT&T and Cox Communications within its footprint. But in terms of the residential market, “we’ve actually found that the communities we’re operating in are extremely underserved…on average there’s less than one 1-gig provider in all of the markets we’re looking to go target,” he said.
Dobson has already begun moving aggressively to expand its reach and lock in a first-mover advantage in these areas.
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The company acquired Arkansas-based Pinnacle Communications in February, boosting its fiber footprint to more than 4,500 route miles. It subsequently added another 350 miles of fiber via a strategic partnership deal with Oklahoma Gas and Electric. And last month, it debuted a 10 Gbps residential service plan for customers in its new Atoka, Enid, Weatherford, Lawton and Duncan, Oklahoma markets. Milliron said the tier is already gaining traction with customers, particularly among remote workers with high-bandwidth needs.
Over the past seven months, Milliron said Dobson Fiber has committed to connect over 65,000 homes to fiber and has “a very ambitious five-year projection which would only accelerate that growth plan in the coming months and years.”
Though supply chain issues are rampant across the industry, Milliron said Dobson has its ducks in a row and is ready to roll. He acknowledged the company is seeing delays in supply of materials and is ordering months in advance of expected builds but noted it has enough inventory in-house to fuel its plans for the “foreseeable future.”
He added “our growth plans are easily oversubscribed by 2-to-1 with what we have in vendor and supply chain, and we’ve purposefully done that to be prepared and ahead of the game for what we don’t know may come in the next six to twelve months.”