Business View Magazine | July 2020

71 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2020 to the home (FTTH); their DSL (a copper based Broadband product) vendor had discontinued manufacturing a number of years earlier and wasn’t capable of ramping up speeds even to 25 Mbps. When you’re in a high-tech environment, technology rolls over every three to five to seven years and if you don’t stay up with it, you find yourself in a hole. That was the situation with New Lisbon Telephone Company – they had a long, solid history and had done a good job of providing telephone service, but they had not kept up with the internet age.” Greene was charged with turning the company around and making sure it was keeping up with the times, which he did. For the last six years, the company has gone through a tremendous period of growth – organic growth as well as a number of acquisitions. The company went from 600 customers in 2014 to over 3000 customers in Indiana, today. According to Greene, “All of the regulated customers are on copper or fiber – we don’t use wireless in our regulated territory. We hope to be 100 percent fiber by next year to NEW L I SBON TELEPHONE COMPANY replace all that old copper plant. But we have overbuilt quite a bit of surrounding territory with both fiber and wireless because customers couldn’t get good service from the large incumbent provider.” Today, NLTC serves residential, commercial, and industrial customers in about half of Henry County, a large portion of Wayne County, almost all of Randolph County, and parts of Union, Fayette, and Delaware Counties. One of their goals is to increase the number of fiber-served areas in all those Indiana counties in the coming years, depending on how the new FCC and state Broadband programs work out. NLTC is also in the final stages of acquiring another telephone company in a different state that will add almost 1,000 customers, reaching the impressive 4000 mark. This will be the company’s fourth acquisition in six years, some of which were multi-million dollar investments. For its size, NLTC is a relatively large provider of backhaul services for cellular towers. They