On Feb. 2, Jeff Bertholdi began working as director of SpringNet Broadband, City Utilities’ fiber-to-the-business broadband and ethernet division. Bertholdi, a 14-year CU veteran who worked most recently as manager of information technology infrastructure, succeeds the retiring Todd Murren. Bertholdi leads a group of 25 employees serving around 900 customers following the recent sale of CU’s SpringNet Underground data center for $8.4 million. In fiscal 2014, which ended Sept. 30, the combined telecommunications and broadband division generated $17.6 million for CU.
Director Duties “We have a sales team, a networking engineering team and an engineering team that deals with our fiber plan, as do the people out in the field who deal with our installations. It’s everything from personnel management to budget forecasting, and budget management to project and duty scheduling. … Our infrastructure runs outside of the city limits to the county, (and) we do have contracts with local businesses that do have business in other states. We have carrier agreements that extend our network into Chicago, Kansas City and some other areas.”
Revenue and Services “(Revenue) for this year is related to just two types of services. One is land link, and one is net link. Land link is (business-to-business), and the other is (business-to-Internet). For example, a hospital may have three clinics and do a B2B service with us – meaning Building A could talk to Building B. That’s one service. John Doe may have an office accounting firm and needs Internet access. That’s our second service – we’d put a link in so he could have Internet access at very high speeds. … Before, we had three multiple types. With the Underground, we had colocation revenues (and) electric revenues for being down there. So, you had a utility bill, an Internet bill and then you had a leased-space bill. Those things are now gone.”
Competitors and Residential Gigabit? “Two big ones, obviously, are AT&T and Mediacom. But we do compete with Verizon and CenturyLink from time to time. The big players are (SpringNet), AT&T and Mediacom for the business options. … (Gigabit service) is not in our current plans. That sort of project that Nixa is undertaking certainly requires involvement from the community because someone has to come up with the capital funding to do it. As the utility, we have limited funding from our ratepayers.”
Customer Overview “I can categorize them as best as I can: large cellular networks, large firms – both law firms and accounting firms – several churches and small businesses. Depending on what their needs are, we can determine if our product is viable for them. We work with the school district, with a bunch of the city and county, several big-hitter businesses in town, banks. We really do (run) the gamut from small businesses to large institutions like Mercy.
A New Focus “I was manager of IT infrastructure. And IT is a completely – what I would call – internal, administrative arm of the company. … Our IT department has three divisions: we have an applications division, which is the software developers; we have a support division, which is the support desk and who you’d call if you had a problem with an application; and then we had the infrastructure division, which was my group. We were the nuts and bolts. We had servers and hard drives, disk storage, fiber networks, cybersecurity – an anti-terror division – a data-based division. … The landscape for this broadband division is changing rapidly, which is very fun to think about.”[[In-content Ad]]
An updated Lawrence County Health Department facility is under construction in a new development area on the south side of Mount Vernon, according to project officials.
