Fiber for Breakfast Week 9: Built to Last

Fiber for Breakfast Week 9: Built to Last 

Seventy-five years is a long time in any business. In telecom, it’s an eternity. When Jimmy Todd, CEO of Nex-Tech joined Gary Bolton on this week’s Fiber for Breakfast, the conversation wasn’t just about anniversaries. It was about endurance and the decisions that allow a rural provider not just to survive industry upheaval, but to keep leading through it.  

Nex-Tech began in 1951 with a simple commitment: serve places others wouldn’t. Rural Kansas towns. Long gravel roads. Sparse exchanges larger carriers didn’t want to maintain. Over the decades, that commitment became a pattern – acquiring neglected exchanges, upgrading infrastructure, and refusing to accept that rural meant second best.  

The real inflection point, Todd said, came with fiber. In the 1990s, Nex-Tech became one of the first providers to deploy fiber-to-the-home in a rural community. At the time, it was a bold move. Today, it defines the company. Fiber allowed Nex-Tech to evolve from a traditional telephone cooperative into a diversified technology company serving more than 11,000 square miles across Kansas.  

“If I could do one thing differently,” Todd reflected, “I probably would have built fiber even faster.” 

That investment changed what was possible. During COVID, communities across their footprint didn’t scramble for connectivity – they worked, learned, and stayed connected. Over time, remote workers moved in. Small-town businesses modernized. Farms adopted precision technologies. Connectivity stopped being a constraint.  

But the story of Nex-Tech isn’t just about network upgrades. It’s about expansion in every direction. As the core fiber network strengthened, the company grew outward, building one of the largest IT managed services operations between Kansas City and Denver, expanding into network monitoring for ISPs nationwide, launching a creative and marketing agency rooted in broadband expertise, and developing data center capabilities to support enterprise customers.  

Each move followed the same logic: build what your community needs. Then scale it. Todd credits none of it to himself alone. Multi-generational employees, families whose parents and now children work at Nex-Tech, are proof, he said, that culture matters as much as capital. In rural communities, especially, a company’s reputation isn’t a marketing slogan, it’s personal.  

Looking ahead, fiber remains the backbone of the next chapter. As AI applications accelerate and data demands explode, Todd sees higher fiber counts, more transport routes, and deeper regional connectivity becoming essential. Rural America won’t sit out the next wave of infrastructure – it will depend on it. Whether through precision agriculture, cybersecurity services, edge data centers, or AI-enabled tools, the future still runs on fiber. 

And in Kansas, it runs on providers willing to think long-term. Seventy-five years ago, Nex-Tech strung copper across open fields because no one else would. Today it’s lighting fiber across those same miles – and building entirely new businesses on top of it.  

Click here to watch the full interview.