In 2002, decaying telco lines made even dial-up access a challenge in most rural areas in southern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. ISDN was only available in limited locations and DSL was nonexistent. As Telpage began to explore delivering broadband Internet access to this underserved area, the company quickly realized that it would have to build out 100 percent of the infrastructure needed to deliver these services. It chose to do so using wireless broadband equipment.

Telpage initially deployed wireless broadband equipment from a variety of manufacturers in the 900 MHz, 2.4 and 5.7 GHz frequencies to support point-to-point and point-to-multipoint applications.

But just four years after implementing that equipment, Telpage realized that the demand for bandwidth had increased tremendously and would eventually outpace the infrastructure's capability. Unfortunately, the equipment in Telpage's existing network could not reliably scale to support this increased demand.