BlueBird Media building "middle-mile" broadband network

Chris Martin is finally getting some sleep these days. But that doesn’t mean he has time to kill.
BlueBird Media, the startup he founded with brother, Tatum Martin, real estate magnate Otto Maly and Jefferson City entrepreneur Greg Johnston, received a $45 million federal grant last month to build a broadband Internet network spanning 59 northern Missouri counties.
BlueBird has six months to complete environmental impact studies for the network’s fiber optic cables and microwave towers — a key first milestone for meeting the government’s multiyear timetable for building the network. Those studies require a lot of legwork and paperwork but nothing like what Martin and his partners endured while preparing BlueBird’s funding application.
“We probably had only three weeks to get all of the paperwork in order,” Martin said. “I’d get about four hours of sleep a day. We worked around the clock. It was crazy.”
So close, yet so far
BlueBird will build what’s known in the telecom industry as a “middle-mile” network. This infrastructure takes Internet traffic from long-haul networks that span the country and globe and passes it to local “last-mile” networks, such as the one that Socket Telecom is building in Callaway County with a separate federal grant.
Middle-mile networks are like onramps between local roads and an interstate — literally and figuratively.
“Between Kansas City and St. Louis is one of the biggest intercontinental fiber routes in the world,” Martin said. “The problem is that there’s limited access to those routes.”
Take Boonville, home to GlenMartin, the telecom tower company where Martin is chief technical officer. When GlenMartin or another company sends something over the Internet, that traffic doesn’t hop straight onto the fiber backbone running along Interstate 70. Instead, it takes the equivalent of a back road to Kansas City, where it finally gets onto the Internet.
“Communities below 500,000 in population generally have limited transport to the major metro areas,” Martin said. “What we brought to the table — what we felt would really revolutionize the rural market — is to build a network that provides that full level of connectivity that major metro markets already experience.”

Cut the cable to cut costs
Besides federal funding, BlueBird also is getting $19.6 million from the state, $9.1 million in cash and $10.5 million worth of access to rights of ways on Missouri roads. That makes it a $65 million project.
Running fiber alongside state roads is one way that BlueBird will help bring broadband to roughly 600,000 households and 57,000 businesses. But even with free access to rights of way, BlueBird has to spend tens of millions of dollars to trench more than 800 miles of fiber optical cable.
In some places, it’s faster and more cost-effective to use wireless at microwave frequencies. BlueBird plans to build 44 microwave towers, and though GlenMartin makes such equipment, that part of the project wasn’t included just to drive business to his family’s company.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a big, gigantic opportunity,” Martin said.
Instead, two factors drove BlueBird’s decision to use microwave. When the state agreed to partner with BlueBird, the company had to come up with a way to reach schools, hospitals and the other “anchor” institutions. But if BlueBird tried to use fiber everywhere, the project’s cost would have been so high that the federal government probably would have rejected it.
“Getting to the dollar figure we did required including some microwave,” Martin said.
Faster and “radically” cheaper
Besides enabling BlueBird to reach more consumers and businesses, microwave also should help the company’s cost of delivering service.
“It’s a night-and-day difference in cost per mile,” Martin said.
Some of that savings will be passed on to customers — including wholesale buyers such as local Internet providers — in the form of lower rates compared with what they currently pay. Exactly how much savings will pass to the customers remains to be seen, but Martin said BlueBird “will radically reduce” the going rate.
If there’s demand, BlueBird eventually could upgrade its network to support 1-terabit speeds. That’s the size of connection that companies such as Facebook say they’ll need to support their data centers in the near future.
“It’s going to be revolutionary,” Martin said. “Terabit delivery will be a reality in Missouri in the near future.”
Who is BlueBird Media?
A year ago, BlueBird Media didn’t exist. Now the Columbia-based startup has lined up nearly $65 million in state and federal funding to build a super-fast broadband network for the northern third of Missouri.
So who is BlueBird? It’s a subsidiary of Cygnus Towers, which erects towers and then sells or leases them to wireless carriers. It’s basically the telecom equivalent of Columbia-based Maly Commercial Realty, whose president, Otto Maly, is one of Cygnus’ managing partners.
Cygnus’ other partners are Chris and Tatum Martin, whose family owns GlenMartin, the Boonville company that manufactures towers. Maly, the Martin brothers and Jefferson City entrepreneur Greg Johnston are BlueBird’s four main partners.