My first industry job was at Critical Networking, a small IT shop in Fairview, Montana. From 2005 into early 2007, I traveled to oil-drilling sites, installed and serviced two-way satellite broadband dishes, and built the onsite networks. The wireless ISP work at MonDakBroadband grew out of that shop.
You can drive fast in eastern Montana and still spend hours getting somewhere. The drilling sites were farther out on dirt roads, with almost nothing around them. They were not necessarily without communications; our work supplemented what they had with satellite links, local networks, and a more modern path to the wider internet.
The two operations shared a building and leadership. Critical Networking formed first, with P. Allen Brown as its manager and organizer. MonDakBroadband followed, with Brown and Chase R. Prewitt as its initial managers. The shop and the ISP operated side by side while I worked there. Brown’s house sat on a hill in a town that is otherwise flat, and it seemed to lord over the place; that is what I remember of it.
That winter the shop won Fairview’s award for the best commercial Christmas display.1 I do not remember much of the display itself, except that the controls sat in some kind of gazebo, with wires running out from it.
Getting a site connected
Critical’s work took me to places where broadband did not arrive through an ordinary cable connection. A satellite dish was one part of the job; the local network behind it still needed to be installed, configured, and kept working.
At MonDak I used mapping software to estimate radio coverage and tower locations, experimented with long-range access points and customer equipment, and worked on the company and customer networks. The service plan covered Fairview, Savage, Lambert, and Mona-Elmdale: towns close enough to cross in an afternoon, far enough apart to make terrain and line of sight part of every installation.
Fixed wireless made sense where trenching cable to a remote or temporary site did not. The partner page named Orthogon and Motorola among the supporting vendors. The work still came down to radios, alignment, cable, signal strength, and whatever the weather was doing around the antenna.
I climbed, aimed, crimped, configured, and answered the phone. In a small operation those were parts of the same job. When a link failed, I could be the person watching it, taking the call, driving to it, and trying to bring it back. There was no separate escalation tier waiting behind me.
Critical was still active alongside it. A local business listing lists the shop among Richland Economic Development’s members. Both companies were involuntarily dissolved in 2007, after my work there had ended.
People who cared about ping
MonDak’s market list included drilling sites, law enforcement, agriculture, small businesses, and “Performance Residential Networks” for “GAMERS and SMALL OFFICE HOME OFFICE.” Someone drafting a rural broadband plan divided the market into rigs, cops, farmers, businesses, and people who cared about ping. I was closest to the last group.
That part reached the community directly. A Sidney Herald story describes MonDakBroadband providing Xbox Live stations and system-link access for a Halo tournament in Fairview’s Sharbono Park. I was there. The gaming side of the company was my doing, and I was probably the one pushing for the tournament. The network was something people could come use together, not just a service area on a map.
Footnotes
“Community service awards presented in Fairview,” Sidney Herald, January 25, 2006, front page. The caption names Critical Networking for the best commercial display; it does not say who built it or where it stood.↩︎