Paladin Wireless is a small company with a big mission: to solve the rural internet problem. We believe that lack of access to high-speed internet translates to a lack of opportunity for our community and for our children. Since our inception, we have worked tirelessly advocating for better access to broadband in the rural parts of Georgia. Steve, our fearless leader, has traveled the state meeting with lawmakers, mayors, and homeowners telling the Paladin story and how by working together we can solve this critical issue in our communities.
The biggest problem we have in all of this is, of course, money. We have consistently discovered that the State and Federal programs that would provide needed capital for what we do tend to favor the larger players by way of how complex the programs are or eligibility criteria that serve to weed out smaller operators. Most recently, the federal government gave Viasat, a giant California based satellite internet provider, 170 million dollars to fix the internet problem in rural Georgia with their satellite internet product. As many of you know satellite internet isn’t the answer for rural Georgia, it has high latency, data-caps, and long contracts but because they could deploy this product cheaper than we could they got the money.
What ends up happening is that we can only go as fast as we can afford to. This means it takes us a lot longer than we would like to get set up in areas that have requested our service. Could crowdfunding work? What if we set up different campaigns for the different areas that wanted our service. Then once we reached the target we would begin building out. This could dramatically decrease the time it takes us to launch a network. We could then provide all program participants with a discount on our service once up and running and a t-shirt or hat. If this is something you are interested in doing, please let us know by answering the question below. If we have enough positive responses, we could start our first campaign this month.
