Since the onset of the pandemic, it’s not a secret that a majority of businesses everywhere have taken a hit. So it's welcome news when a company reports unusual growth and profitability, and even better news when the source of that business is the burgeoning growth of broadband projects throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada, where insufficient access to internet connectivity has come into sharp focus.
According to Paul Sulisz, CEO of Biarri Networks, a global end-to-end telecom engineering firm, 2020 was a banner year. His company grew at a remarkable pace in 2020, expanding its workforce and setting new records for the company’s network design work. By year end, Biarri, which is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and Melbourne, Australia, had completed high-level designs (HLD) for nearly a dozen new projects that included 761,407 homes passed, smashing previous company records. More than 500,000 of these designs went on to become construction-ready low-level designs. To facilitate that level of output, Sulisz also reported that Biarri grew its team by over 20%, increasing its workforce to one hundred globally.
“The past year presented many challenges for everyone,” he said, “but our entire team worked tirelessly to design high-speed fiber networks that, once built, will connect close to a million homes, enabling access to education, telehealth, jobs, and more.” He said that by leveraging Biarri’s rural-broadband and wireless expertise, his engineering teams were able to deliver accurate data-driven designs that were far more precise than traditional network design assumptions. “It was clear that we brought to the table something that was sorely needed.”
Rural broadband projects in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, are helping to fuel Biarri’s continued growth. Sulisz said that even across borders, the issues were the same. “It often boils down to how to fund and connect communities with little or no broadband access,” he says. Yet the demand is intense.
“The biggest overall trend in 2020 was that rural areas became more aggressive in their desire to participate in our data-driven economy,” Sulisz said. “Programs like the Connect America Fund and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), even with all the strings attached, have driven activity. Most importantly, electric co-ops have rolled up their collective sleeves to tackle the challenge, particularly in the U.S.”
Likewise, Biarri is anticipating another busy year in 2021. The company will be opening an office in Vietnam and supporting a significant network construction push in North America as many of the 761,407 homes passed in the HLD will be connected to lit fiber. Sulisz says his company continues to grow with nearly 20 new and existing projects in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
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