The internet prefers to introduce itself as weather. We upload to a cloud, stream from somewhere above the horizon and complain when the signal grows stormy. Dave Drazen has spent his career attending to the less poetic truth: the internet is stubbornly physical. It runs through glass threads under streets, enters buildings through specific walls, lands at data centers and climbs towers that occupy actual patches of earth. The cloud, once mapped, has an alarming number of addresses.
Drazen founded GeoTel Communications in Central Florida in 2001. The company’s proposition was specialized but plain: collect telecommunications infrastructure data, give it geographic coordinates and make it useful. GeoTel now delivers that material as GIS datasets and through TeleTracker, a browser-based platform where a user can search an address, compare nearby carrier routes, inspect fiber-lit buildings and export a view for colleagues. It is cartography with a purchase order attached.
That work occupies an odd and consequential seam. A telecom operator may know its own network. A property team may know its buildings. A public agency may know the communities it needs to connect. None automatically possesses a common picture. Drazen’s business has grown by assembling one - then keeping it current while streets are dug, towers rise, companies merge and networks change hands.
A database with dirt under its fingernails
GeoTel describes 15 specialized telecom datasets covering such assets as carrier fiber routes, fiber-lit buildings, cell towers, data centers, submarine cable landings and central offices. In a 2026 company profile, it reported 5.7 million carrier fiber-route miles, 15.7 million fiber-lit buildings, 533,000 cell towers and coverage of 7,500 carriers. Large numbers make handsome brochures. Their real value here is more prosaic: they reduce the amount of detective work required before someone commits money to a route, a site or a connection.
The maintenance is the business. GeoTel says its records have been refined through 25 years of validation, with daily updates flowing from its production database into TeleTracker. A beautiful map that lies is merely expensive wallpaper. Drazen’s public language keeps returning to depth, precision and trusted data because the output has to survive contact with engineering, finance and the street.
We deliver the industry’s most comprehensive and trusted geospatial telecom datasets, defined by unmatched depth and precision.Dave Drazen, 2026
The practical test arrived in a case involving a space agency that needed to examine diverse terrestrial fiber paths from one state to another. The customary hunt involved multiple imperfect sources and extensive validation on the ground. TeleTracker produced the required view in minutes. This is the quiet triumph of vertical software: not confetti, but the deletion of several miserable steps.
One question, three layers
A stylized view of the decision TeleTracker is built to support: which route connects two sites while preserving a genuinely different path?
When a map becomes a meeting
Drazen’s most portable idea is not about cables. It is about shared context. Telecom geography used to require specialist software, local knowledge and an appetite for incompatible files. TeleTracker brings the data into a browser and lets engineers, sales teams, marketers and executives look at the same scene. The expert can interrogate the layers; the executive can understand the exported image. Both can point to the same line.
In 2016, GeoTel formed an alliance with engineering firm Burns & McDonnell to make location-based telecom analysis more accessible through web services. Drazen argued that predictive analytics, location intelligence and visualization would help companies make better decisions. The enduring bit is the sequence: locate, visualize, compare, decide. Artificial intelligence may decorate the verb list, but it cannot rescue a route placed on the wrong road.
GeoTel’s maps have also traveled beyond the conference room. Fortune used the company’s telecom data and fiber maps in features about the physical internet and big data in 2012 and 2014. The appeal is obvious. Readers accustomed to invisible connections could suddenly see long-haul lines, metro networks, submarine cables and data centers arranged across a country. An abstraction acquired geography.
The patience of a specialist
A company founded in 2001 has lived through several versions of the telecom future. Broadband moved from an amenity to an expectation. Smartphones placed wireless demand in nearly every pocket. Cloud computing made distant data centers feel local. Streaming converted evening entertainment into sustained network traffic. Then 5G, edge computing and hyperscale facilities added fresh urgency to old questions about capacity, proximity and resilience. Each wave sounded novel in public and arrived, eventually, as another physical planning problem.
Drazen’s choice was to stay with the underlying geography. That is a different entrepreneurial temperament from chasing the newest application. The work rewards accumulation: another carrier researched, another route checked, another building matched, another acquisition reflected in the record. A competitor can draw an interface quickly. Recreating years of reviewed infrastructure history is a less cheerful weekend project.
It also means serving customers whose questions begin in different departments. A network planner may ask whether two paths are truly diverse. A commercial property team may want to know which buildings are already lit. A data-center developer may compare fiber density and carrier presence around candidate sites. A public-sector team may look for broadband gaps. The datasets remain the same pieces of reality; value appears when those pieces are arranged around the decision at hand.
Drazen’s published essay on Data as a Service makes this operational view explicit. Before acquiring data, he argued, a company should identify the problem, test whether the information fits its market and brand strategy, and establish a hierarchy of needs. Only then does the data travel through growth, delivery and measurable return. It is sensible advice, bordering on unfashionable. Buy the answer to a question, not a warehouse full of possible answers.
That restraint matters in geospatial work because maps possess theatrical authority. Put a colored line over an aerial image and it immediately looks official. The harder craft is documenting what the line represents, how recently it was checked and what a user may safely conclude from it. Drazen has built his public case around that distinction. The product is not the spectacle of seeing infrastructure. It is the confidence to act on what is shown.
The bus is part of the map
The warmer chapter in Drazen’s public record takes place among small drones, robots and several hundred schoolchildren. At UCF’s GIS Day in November 2019, students moved among hands-on stations devoted to mapping, coding, topography and virtual reality. Organizers were also building GeoBus, a reclaimed 40-foot city bus intended to become a mobile geospatial laboratory for Florida schools.
GeoTel was among the sponsors. Drazen attended and spoke about the less photogenic requirement of any educational project: sustaining it after the unveiling. GeoBus, he said, would need outside funding and support for the long term. “That’s what we want to help with.” It is a modest line, and therefore a useful one. The same founder whose company tracks infrastructure understood that a talent pipeline is infrastructure too.
Earlier that year, GeoTel had announced a partnership with EducationSuperHighway, then focused on upgrading internet access in public-school classrooms. Drazen connected broadband with access to digital learning and said the company was eager to play a role. The subject may be telecom data, but the endpoint is often ordinary human possibility: a school connected, a business site evaluated, a public project planned with fewer blind spots.
The next dimension
Drazen also writes. His published articles have examined Data as a Service, trends in location-based intelligence and the relationship among hyperscalers, telecom companies and network reinvention. Across them runs a consistent belief: data earns its keep when an organization can connect it to a defined problem, a usable workflow and a measurable decision. Collecting more is not the same as knowing more.
GeoTel’s present direction adds depth and motion to the old flat map. The company says it is investing in 3D mapping, digital twins, immersive visualization, automation, real-time integration and predictive capabilities. Dense telecom markets are difficult to read in two dimensions; routes, buildings and assets overlap. A three-dimensional model can make those relationships intelligible to people who do not spend their days inside GIS software.
There is a pleasing continuity to the ambition. In 2001, the challenge was to give scattered physical infrastructure a reliable place on a map. In 2026, the challenge is to let a user move through that map, test its layers and model what might happen next. The medium evolves. The discipline does not: validate the point, understand the route, update the record.
Founders are often advised to seek enormous markets. Drazen’s career suggests a sharper instruction: seek the overlooked layer beneath an enormous market. Telecommunications became the substrate of modern work, commerce and entertainment, while its physical geography remained difficult to assemble. GeoTel built a long-running business in that gap. Every new tower, data center and strand of fiber makes the map more complicated - and the need for a dependable map more obvious.
The internet will continue dressing like weather. That is part of its charm. Somewhere in Lake Mary, however, a team will keep assigning the cloud its street addresses. Dave Drazen’s contribution is to make those addresses visible enough that the next decision can begin.