29 Oct Bob Greene
Bob has been doing work with communications his entire life. He started with the military where he learned and worked with several brands of electro-mechanical switching components both foreign and domestic. After completing his service with an honorable discharge, he continued in this endeavor through private contractors. To round his career, he went to work with the manufacturer of equipment for several years managing the installation, testing, and turnup of their equipment. He has worked with the telephone operations group providing dial tones to customers and businesses. He moved on from these jobs to start building a cellular operations company, this company was built with over 80 cell sites and 80,000 subscribers and sold in 1999. After this endeavor, we started another company called HighSpeed Communications where we bid on LMDS licenses and won almost all licenses from Colorado to Hawaii. This was going to be a large undertaking to build high-speed communications across the western united states. Equipment manufactures were unable to get the scale right to build the equipment in a timely manner and this business was sold in 2004. After that, I dedicated all my energy to Columbia REA a little-known cooperative distribution company in SE Washington. They wanted to learn and build the communications side of their business for their members and others outside their existing territory. Today we manage about 1600 internet customers, from small customers to customers that have 1000’s employees. Most of these customers are wireless today although we have been migrating them over to fiber for the last 4 years as we continue to grow the overall subsidiary business unit.
