Ritter’s RightFiber at the Right Time

Northwest Arkansas has undergone an economic boon in recent years, anchored by legendary Fortune #1 company Walmart and companions Tyson Foods (#85) and J.B. Hunt Transportation Services (# 316). It’s an area where Ritter Communications finds itself well-positioned to serve today through their recent fiber expansion and launch of RightFiber residential services. But, the privately-held company wants to make sure people understand it is as equally dedicated to all of the small towns and mid-sized communities it serves across its five-state territory.

“We’re always growing,” said Heath Simpson, CEO, Ritter Communications. “We really enjoy connecting unserved and underserved communities. We’re always looking for communities that fit our target profile, if you will. It’s somewhere that the ILEC and the cable company has overlooked. It’s a community that’s not a Tier 1 or NFL city. It’s typically a smaller town, small town America.”

Ritter Communications traces its history back to 1906, when the Ritter family started up a phone company in Marked Tree, Arkansas, located in the northeast part of the state. About a dozen years ago, the company started expanding its physical infrastructure.

“My predecessor saw the value of fiber and started building fiber networks in selected areas,” said Simpson. “Capital was tight. Capital availability is always a limitation for all of us in fiber. In 2019, the family, being very forward thinking, brought in Grain Management, a private equity partner firm headquartered in Washington, D.C., that’s focused solely in the telecom space.”

Ritter sold a majority stake to Grain, which brought in capital and debt financing to “accelerate” the company’s fiber investments, enabling it to build fiber across dozens of unserved and underserved communities in the mid-South as well as the ability to offer full-scale enterprise services to the businesses in the region.  

The company has grown to serve 155 communities across the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas, with 5,600 miles of its own fiber “and a bit more every day,” said Simpson. Creating its RightFiber offering meant examining what it could offer to households in terms of simplifying the customer experience and make it easy for customers to interact with them.

“We just didn’t launch fiber to the home, we reimagined what home internet service should be,” said Simpson. “If you are a customer of the typical incumbent, you get your bill, it has a bunch of add-ons, of taxes and fees and surcharges and whatnot. We said let’s just do away with all that nonsense. If we tell somebody the bill is 60 bucks, let’s make it 60 bucks.”

RightFiber launched with 1 Gbps service in 2021 with take rates that were “well above what we expected” and now offers 2 Gbps and 5 Gbps service tiers. The company currently passes over 100,000 homes with its greenfield fiber builds and passes another 60,000 homes with its legacy HFC cable company.  

Further expansions are in process, with an edge-out strategy based upon where RightFiber’s network is and finding out which communities want alternatives to their existing service provider. “We go into these areas where the incumbents just kind of rested on their laurels and have not upgraded or have not invested in the network,” said Simpson. “We’ll usually meet with mayors or economic development folks, and talk with them, understand what the needs of their communities are. When we find those communities, we go there. We are looking at adjacent states as well. We have some great opportunities in a couple of nearby states we’re not quite ready to announce, but very soon.”