How a Gulf Coast cellular start-up became the biggest privately held wireless carrier in America - by making towns compete to get fiber first, then wiring the rest of the state anyway.
For 35 years a homegrown carrier from Wilkesboro put bars on the map where the big networks saw only blank terrain. In 2026 it agreed to hand the signal to Verizon - a small-carrier story about who actually pays to cover a mountain.