Rural America’s Last Best Hope

Is it fear mongering or sensationalistic to call Roger Hutton and his NetAmerica Alliance rural America’s last best hope? Not if you’re talking about the fate of rural independent operating companies, those small, but important fixtures in the far-flung communities of every state, or the jobs they represent, or the independence they provide from national and international conglomerates that can’t pretend to know or care about them as their own neighbors do. Not if you’re talking about preserving a way of life while simultaneously enhancing it with the self-sufficient access to real-time information that the rest of the country enjoys. 

The NetAmerica Alliance LLC, a spinoff from CHR Solutions and led by former CHR CEO Roger Hutton and several CHR personnel who came with him, will work with independent 4G license holders to help them utilize the significant investment they made in spectrum in a way that individually they never could. They will have access to nationwide branding and marketing, a shared, fully staffed network operations center, core networking elements such as an Evolved Packet Core, applications development and negotiated nationwide roaming agreements. It also gives them something essential to competing with larger national and regional players: buying power.

NetAmerica has already struck a deal with Ericsson to be the sole supplier of 4G/LTE mobile network technology to rural operators in the alliance at a price point once reserved for the Tier 1s.

“Our mission was to find a way to help all these companies share capex and get it down to where it makes sense. The only way to get that buying power is to bring together critical mass so you look like a large provider with the kind of power in the marketplace to negotiate favorable rates," Hutton said.

We said that rural operators have alternatives. Some have already chosen an alternate path.

Bluegrass Cellular recently became one of the first rural mobile operators to enter an agreement with Verizon Wireless to lease its 700 MHz upper C-block wireless spectrum and bring LTE to central Kentucky. Bluegrass will build and operate its own LTE network in an arrangement that some see as dancing with the devil since rural operators were for all practical purposes locked out of the most recent 700MHz spectrum auction.

The FCC set reserve prices too high for small companies to afford individually and its anti-collusion rules kept them from banding together to buy airwaves as a group, yet it allowed large providers to bid on rural spectrum.

By mid-April, Verizon had signed up eight rural operators, including Indiana-based S and R Communications — a joint venture between Swayzee Communications and Rochester Telephone Co., Cellcom, Cross Wireless, Pioneer Cellular, Strata Networks, Thumb Wireless and Carolina West. These operators represent nearly 2 million people and 60,000 square miles in Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin and Utah.