Local internet provider PCI marks 15 years

For an Internet provider, 15 years may as well be a century. PCI Broadband is marking that anniversary this week and the local company has managed to stay alive in the tumultuous telecommunications world and keep all three of its co-founders on board — and even a few of its original customers.

“Just about every year, I think we’ve got another five years. But I’ve been saying that for 10 years,” said Sean Skogen, one of the co-founders.

Founded by Skogen, Dave Wainwright and Jeff Wong in 1996, PCI started out as little more than a room filled with blinking modems and it primarily offered dial-up internet to residential customers. Today, the company offers DSL and wireless internet and VOIP phone service, and business services like T1 lines, ethernet connections and colocation (although there are still a few people using dial-up connections).

“We certainly have a lot of customers that have been with us for 15 years almost,” Wainwright said. “They started with us on dial-up and they moved on to usually DSL or the wireless product.”

Wainwright and Skogen met in the Air Force, working on the GPS system, while Wong was a civilian scientist working on the program. When they left the service, it was the heyday for AOL and, locally, Rocky Mountain Internet, and so they decided to start an Internet service provider, or ISP.

“Dave came to me and said ‘Let’s start an ISP,’ and I said, ‘Sure, let’s start an ISP. What’s an ISP?” Wong said.

In the earliest days, PCI offered 14.4-kilobyte-per-second and 28.8k modems — 56.6k wasn’t available yet.

“We sat around and watched the lights (on the modems) going on,” Wong said.

“‘Look, there’s three people online and it’s not us!’” Wainwright said. “It was exciting.”

Today, it’s getting increasingly difficult for a small provider to compete for home Internet service, Wainwright said. The company gained access to Qwest’s (now CenturyLink Communications) DSL lines a decade ago, but has been shut out of using its new, higher-speed lines. PCI’s wireless Internet, which uses a fixed antenna, offers a possible solution, since the government may free up more frequency space out of the old analog TV spectrum, but the residential broadband slugfest has driven PCI to focus more on business services. From a high of about 10,000 residential customers, PCI now has about 2,500.

“It’s really hard for us to compete with Qwest and Comcast, who are trying to kill each other,” Wainwright said. “It is a very tough, cost-competitive business.”

Many of PCI’s customers stick with the company because they prefer to deal with a local company, or prefer hands-on service, Wong said.

“Clearly, at our level, it’s all about service,” Wong said. “You’ve got to be able to call somebody up and get what you need.”

“We reinvented ourselves a number of times,” Skogen said. “I think our days of growing like we used to are limited, but we can certainly react faster to customers’ needs than an AT&T or a Qwest. We can invent new pricing or products on the spot if we need to.”

Surviving as a small fish in the very large and predatory telecommunications pond means controlling costs, staying personally involved and always looking for the next step, Wainwright said.

“I still have a copy of our original business plan,” he said. “The things we do now, I could not envision to start with. I’m as amazed to be sitting here on the 15-year anniversary as anybody.”

The founders had offers to buy PCI over the years, but they liked working for themselves and always wanted to stick around to see what happened next in the industry.

“I really had nothing better to do,” Wainwright said. “I like doing this.”