The last mile is a deceptively polite name for the part of the internet that causes the arguments. It is the final distance between a powerful network and an actual kitchen table. In Maine, that distance may include spruce trees, granite, salt water, a camp road and a household sitting just far enough from town to ruin an otherwise handsome spreadsheet. Jim McKenna has spent roughly two decades working inside that inconvenience. His company, Redzone Wireless, exists because he believes the final stretch does not always need a wire.
McKenna's thesis is more practical than the familiar fiber-versus-wireless brawl suggests. Fiber is excellent at moving enormous quantities of data. He knows because he spent years building it. His argument is about placement: use fiber for the middle mile, where traffic can be gathered and carried efficiently, then use radio for the expensive final hop to scattered homes and businesses. The idea sounds neat on paper. Maine has spent twenty years making him prove it in public.
McKenna's division of labor
high capacity
shared reach
home or business
A systems education
Before the towers, McKenna learned engineering in places that permit very little hand-waving. He attended the United States Naval Academy from 1984 to 1988, trained through Naval Reactors and served as a Navy officer on nuclear submarines. Later came commercial telecommunications: fiber construction, executive roles and an early packet-based voice company in Atlanta. He expanded that business into four East Coast markets and sold it in 2002.
He moved north for reasons he once cheerfully called selfish. Midcoast Maine was beautiful. The broadband market was not. In a 2006 account, McKenna described a place where many households were choosing between dial-up and connections that strained local budgets. He had spent two years traveling as chief technology officer for telecom companies. The problem outside his own door began to look more interesting than another flight.
Redzone's first network was a resourceful mixture of proprietary wireless mesh and standards-based Wi-Fi. Mesh radios hauled customer traffic across the Midcoast network; Wi-Fi served entry plans and mobile users, including public-safety teams. Within its first year, the company said it covered 250 square miles and ten communities. The service started at $19.95 a month. The engineering challenge and the affordability challenge were already inseparable.
The scale was small enough for job titles to become suggestions. A customer testimonial filed with Maine public records in 2008 recalled that McKenna returned calls, responded to email, visited the customer's home office and climbed towers. It is an unusually concrete portrait of an infrastructure founder: part chief executive, part field technician, and occasionally the person expected to go upward until the signal improved. The same customer praised the local team for resolving early problems quickly, including the complications of an all-Mac household.
Years later, a company tribute filled in the off-duty outline. McKenna had moved back to the East Coast, raised three sons in Maine, competed in Ironman events and climbed mountains. Those pursuits can invite easy metaphors about endurance, but the more useful connection is procedural. Submarine operations, long races, mountaineering and rural networks are all systems of preparation followed by conditions that decline to follow the plan. McKenna's public manner reflects that mix. He is fond of a firm thesis, yet he speaks plainly about waiting lists, technical limits and the moments when his preferred technology disappointed him.
That candor makes the conviction more credible. The first version of Redzone was not presented as a moonshot. It was a response to neighbors paying too much for too little, assembled from radios that could meet the local price. The mission was expansive; the early equipment was modest. Maine would supply the stress test.
“I'm very passionate about wireless in the last mile.”Jim McKenna, 2023
The radio meets the forest
Early fixed wireless was not magic. Unlicensed spectrum carried modest power and could be defeated by distance, terrain or a badly placed tree. At one stage, Redzone could serve only about twenty of every hundred people who asked for a connection. By 2014, roughly 5,000 names sat on a waiting list outside the network's practical reach. McKenna called it discouraging, which is the restrained vocabulary of an engineer whose market has just encountered physics.
The company itself changed shape. McKenna sold the original operation to Maine investors in 2014, reformed it and stayed at the helm. The next plan used LTE equipment on existing towers, fiber already running through the state, and licensed spectrum made available through a long-term agreement with the University of Maine System. In 2015, the Finance Authority of Maine insured most of a $4 million bank loan intended for equipment and expansion. Public institutions, private capital and a local operator were now lashed to the same mast.
McKenna liked to make the economics tangible. In 2015 he compared a $100,000 tower installation, capable of reaching a rural community, with roughly a mile of fiber that had not yet entered a single home. His point was not that fiber was deficient. It was that rural density makes each final connection expensive. A wire gains no sympathy from a long driveway.
The network expanded through Portland, Waterville, Greater Bangor and coastal communities. Redzone bought GWI's Midcoast wireless assets in 2016, adding customers in small mainland towns and islands including Vinalhaven, Monhegan and Matinicus. Each new place was a small referendum on the same proposition: could shared radio infrastructure overcome the cost of putting a dedicated line everywhere?
Conviction, revised by evidence
The useful detail in McKenna's story is that his belief wobbled. By 2022, Redzone's LTE network faced narrow channel widths in parts of its territory, limiting the speeds it could offer. Wireless competitors were moving. Fiber funding was growing. McKenna later admitted that he had considered returning to his roots in fiber. For someone publicly identified with fixed wireless, it was an unusually clean confession.
Then newer equipment altered the calculation. Redzone deployed Tarana's next-generation fixed-wireless system in Litchfield, where a demonstration recorded 614 megabits per second over roughly two miles despite a building obstructing the radio path. The system used a hybrid architecture, with fiber feeding wireless infrastructure. By 2023, Redzone said it could sell 500 Mbps service in selected areas. McKenna's enthusiasm returned, not because the old radios had secretly been right, but because better radios had arrived.
There is a founder's lesson tucked into that reversal. McKenna stayed stubborn about the problem and negotiable about the machinery. Mesh gave way to LTE. LTE was complemented by CBRS and next-generation fixed wireless. He discussed testing 5G equipment while praising the coverage and capacity of the system already in the field. Infrastructure ages in dog years. Loyalty to a particular box would be an eccentric hobby.
“A year ago, I thought I was going to go back to my roots in fiber.”McKenna on the doubt before a technical reset
The next bottleneck is five days
By 2026, McKenna was describing a different kind of last mile: the interval between ordering service and actually using it. Redzone had begun shipping indoor fixed-wireless devices that a customer could plug in without scheduling a technician or mounting rooftop equipment. McKenna reported that the self-install option was outselling traditional installations by roughly five to one.
Speed and price still matter, of course. But his observation was sharper: convenience may matter more at the moment of purchase. One product arrives in a box and works in minutes. The other requires calendars, an installation window and perhaps a ladder. The technical achievement becomes valuable only when the customer can begin using it. For an operator trained to think about spectrum, propagation and backhaul, time-to-internet is a pleasingly human metric.
The air is shared
Wireless also introduces a quarrel that buried fiber does not: everyone is using the same sky. In 2024, McKenna said T-Mobile's 2.5 GHz operations were interfering with Redzone customers in Maine. T-Mobile declined to discuss the allegation in the industry report that carried it. McKenna called for technical coordination, said he would fly to Seattle to meet, and left open regulatory or legal action. Redzone later raised the dispute in an FCC transaction proceeding; the agency said the complaint lacked a connection to that particular transaction.
The episode is unresolved in the public material, so it offers no tidy verdict. It does reveal the new scale of McKenna's neighborhood. Redzone began by contesting the last mile with cable and dial-up. It now operates beside national mobile networks and satellite broadband. The local radio company has more capable tools, and more capable neighbors.
Through all those changes, the aspiration has held steady: make broadband affordable where conventional network economics are least forgiving. The current Redzone says it serves more than 100 Maine towns and more than 20 island communities. Its website speaks in the practical dialect of the state: back roads, camps, snow, power outages, a local office and a person who answers the phone.
McKenna once described broadband in Midcoast Maine as either unavailable or unaffordable. Twenty years later, his company is still working both adjectives. There is no final technology in this story, only a sequence of better compromises. The fiber carries the distance. The tower divides it. The radio crosses the trees. And somewhere at the end, the internet arrives at a kitchen table that the spreadsheet almost forgot.