In 2002, Mooh moved to Sayo Township, a rural area in Michigan State, where his employer provided the future entrepreneur with an excellent home-based connection: many of his neighbors were still suffering from slow-dial-up access at the time; however, after a while the network ' s capacity ceased to cope with Mouch ' s technical skills and the needs of his growing family.
But when he started looking at the alternative, he wasn't comfortable with the options. The speed of the Internet from AT&T was painfully low. Comcast wanted to charge him an advance of $50,000 for expanding his services to his home.
Instead of providing such money only to depend on the whims of an Internet provider, a 46-year-old man decided to create his own fibre-optic Internet provider.
"I had every reason to believe that I would be able to meet many of the necessary conditions and then offer my services to the local community, and to do so better than large companies," he said. "I saw in this an excellent opportunity both to expand services and to realize what I am interested in."
He started the company in 2017, and in 2019, he got permission to start construction, and in August 2020 he was officially in business, just in time for his kids to go to a virtual school during a pandemic.
"It was great," he remembered. "I had the home fiber that I controlled and the ability to control my future destiny."
He also connected his neighbors to his high-speed fibre-optic lines, and his business has grown and is now serving 71 clients with reliable Internet services. He has already laid over 22 kilometres of cable around the county with contractors, and sometimes it takes almost a kilometre of cable to connect one house in rural areas.
Now Mooh gets $2.6 million from the federal budget to continue his work. He was one of the four Internet providers who received federal money to expand fibre-optic Internet services in the district in connection with the pandemic. With this money, Mauh plans to connect 600 more houses to the network. This will require the construction of a further 61 km of cable.
Sharrer hopes that by the end of 2024, the entire district will be served by high-speed broadband access.
According to Broadband Now, about 42 million Americans do not have broadband access.