John Loud left an airline cockpit for an alarm panel, then built a nearly 13,000-customer company around an unfashionable idea: answer the phone, know the customer and make the machinery work.
VGI spent years working around the limits of rural wireless. Then a skeptical pilot hit 600 Mbps, one water-tower radio carried more than 130 customers, and a granite-bound Texas community finally got a credible alternative to slow broadband.