WildBlue set to grow with new satellite

Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 2, 2006 at midnight

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A clock in the break room of WildBlue Communications' Denver Tech Center office counts down the minutes until next Friday's launch of the company's new satellite.

And, the company hopes, a new surge of subscribers.

WildBlue, which introduced its high-speed Internet service to rural areas in June 2005, has about 100,000 subscribers and is signing up new ones at a clip of 10,000 a month. The company is currently leasing space on a Canadian satellite that's run out of room to send signals to new customers in areas of the Midwest and East Coast.

The WildBlue-1 satellite should solve that, tripling the amount of customers the company can reach throughout the U.S. That capacity is going to come in handy as WildBlue's marketing agreements with DirecTV and EchoStar's Dish Network, the primary sources of pay TV for rural residents, go into full swing early next year. WildBlue also has a similar arrangement with phone company AT&T.

"This will be a big step forward," said Ken Carroll, WildBlue's president and chief operating officer. The combination of the new satellite and DirecTV and Dish deals "really are going to create a turning point for the company next year."

Nearly 15 million rural residents can't receive high-speed Internet from phone or cable companies because of the cost required to build their networks out to thinly populated areas. About 25 percent of rural residents had high-speed Internet connections at home, according to a 2006 Pew Internet survey, compared with about 46 percent in suburban areas.

"We're trying to bridge that digital divide," he said.

WildBlue, whose investors include John Malone's Liberty Media, isn't the first company to offer satellite-based high- speed Internet service. Hughes Network Systems and Spacenet, which sells the Starband service, are competitors.

It also may eventually face competition from alternative technologies, such as broadband over powerlines and Wi-Max technology that transmits wireless Internet signals over a range of miles.

WildBlue's service isn't cheap. Basic service costs about $50 a month, nearly twice as much as Qwest's slowest DSL, and the dish costs $299.

But some customers have no other options. Kathy and Alfred Luke run a 6,000-acre ranch five miles outside Julesburg in northeastern Colorado. They started looking for high-speed Internet access a year ago so they could participate in online cattle auctions but didn't have any luck with their dial-up Internet service provider, Qwest, or their local satellite service provider.

"I know that farming people are the last to get anything - electricity, indoor plumbing," Kathy Luke said. "It was such a struggle finding someone."

But WildBlue has worked, she said.

"We're happy to have it," she said. "I can't compare it to anything else because we can't get anything else."

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