An Interview with Matt Larsen, WISPA 2025 Operator of the Year: How Open Access Could Rewrite The ISP Playbook

What if the best ISP on your block doesn’t own the tower—or even the access network? Drew sits down with Matt Larson, founder and CEO of VistaBeam and chair of WISPA, to explore how open access for fixed wireless and fiber could flip the broadband model from top to bottom. With radio platforms now supporting hundreds of subscribers per sector and multi‑operator IDs on the same AP, shared infrastructure is finally reliable enough to scale.

We dig into the real-world friction behind RDOF and BEAD, from delays to defaults, and why contract terms like termination for convenience and reimbursement cadence determine whether builders participate or walk. Matt shares a pragmatic blueprint: treat the access layer like a utility, let specialists focus on what they do best, and use a neutral clearinghouse to standardize APIs, reconcile usage, and settle payments across many operators. The payoff is faster market entry, lower capex per brand, and healthier rural broadband economics.

Along the way, we trade notes on vendor advances, consolidation jitters, and the quiet power of AI to improve network operations, customer support, and data analysis without the buzzwords. Most importantly, we spotlight partnerships that replace range wars: one operator runs rock‑solid infrastructure, another owns local relationships, and both win by eliminating duplicate towers, rents, and headaches. If you care about broadband equity, small‑ISP survival, or simply getting reliable service where you live, this conversation offers a clear path forward.

Enjoy the episode? Follow the show, share it with a colleague who cares about open access, and leave a quick review to help more builders find us. Then tell us: would you trade some margin to move faster on shared infrastructure?

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Matt Larson At Wispapalooza
• 2:40 Hardware Leaps And Access Capacity
• 4:00 Policy Whiplash: RDOF And BEAD
• 5:40 Contract Risks And Reimbursement
• 7:40 AI Buzz And Real Uses
• 8:48 Open Access Becomes Viable
• 10:40 Multi‑Operator On Shared Radios
• 12:30 Clearinghouse And Standards Vision
• 14:20 Specialization Over Vertical Control
• 15:50 From Range Wars To Partnerships
• 17:50 Rethinking Ownership And Collaboration
• 18:40 Closing And Listener Feedback

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:30

Hey everybody, Drew Lintz, the Wireless Nerd, and this week we have a special edition interview podcast. Now, last week I got to visit the Wispapalooza show for 2025, and I got to hang out with some old friends and see some old faces and see some great new equipment. And one of the people I got to sit down and have a conversation with was Mr. Matt Larson. Now, Matt is the CEO and founder of VistaBeam, and VistaBeam is a pioneering wireless and fiber broadband provider with coverage spanning 40,000 square miles across four states and over a hundred towns. They provide service to residents and businesses in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. And this year the industry voted to award VistaBeam as the 2025 operator of the year. In addition to his daily activities running VistaBeam, Matt is the chairperson for the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association. I got to have a conversation with him about what open access looks like. A little bit about the future of what a wireless ISP or a fiber ISP could delve into. Now, this is something that I've talked about on a blog. It's something that I've had conversations with people about. But essentially the idea is that you can build a network. And once that network is built, someone maintains that network, but other providers use that network. So imagine if you had one operator that owned towers and infrastructure all across the country, but small independent ISPs had the ability to utilize that equipment to spread their service across the nation. And they weren't responsible for the actual equipment in the tower, they're just responsible for the service that runs across it. So without further ado, I'd like to uh jump into the interview with Mr. Matt Larson from Wispapalooza 2025. Matt Larson. Okay, so tell me about tell me about Wispapalooza 25. Well, I mean, this was it's been a minute since I've been here, but there's an air of excitement around where the technology is, and for us who've been doing it for so long, where how far it's come.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21

You know, I think a lot of what's going on, I think a lot of the technology is kind of maturing. Um the big one for me is uh on the on the access side, the Toronto gear just continues to get better and better. Their new G2, being able to put 500 people on a base station. It's insane. It's huge. And still use the same customer radios. You know, it's pricey, but it works. I've got some on my network, and you know, we we put it up, we set it, forget it, kind of.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50

That's I that's I I talked to them earlier, and that that was the whole thing. When they came down to South Texas and they did the whole you know, see it to believe it event. I went out and we did a little tour and got to see everything, and that was that was a takeaway. It's like wow, this is actually real. Yeah, which is hard for people like us who've been through so many technology iterations to take somebody like that seriously because it seems like there's no way it could happen, but they continue to improve. Yeah, it's it's like having a g Pond node in the sky. It's crazy. And then I talked to Cambium also about their product, the the Evo product, and how they're how they're they're consolidating access into a single unit, and that's pretty to see that happening also was pretty cool. Overall, um, what are how are the Wisps these days? The government's making it a little bit weird.

SPEAKER_01: 3:32

It's tough to be a Wisp. You know, there's we've seen some consolidation. I think some people have kind of gotten scared out of the market a little bit. Um, one of the really disappointing things is these last couple rounds of government programs, um, RDOF and Bede have been kind of a train wreck in a lot of ways. Yeah, uh it introduced a bunch of uncertainty into the market. Um, we had like wild auctions with defaults and new players that didn't really seem to have a real plan on how they were gonna execute. Uh and then a nowhere satellite. And then what? And then coming into Bede, Bede is it's a program that was designed five years ago and should have been started on three years ago. Yeah, yes. And it said, here we are, five years later, it's like a giant mess. Yeah. And the industry was just all over the place. And so a lot of people, I think, got scared of government money coming in over building them and just scared out of the market.

SPEAKER_00: 4:32

So so how much of that did you hear at the show where were people's concerns about being because it has it has been a little bit of a nightmare. On every front, I mean from the equipment manufacturer side, they thought that POs were gonna start rolling, and so they ramped up product, and from the consultant side, they thought they had business coming in, and from the ISP side they were ramping up to do stuff or staffing up, and I mean it's like and it it you create a lot of uncertainty. How much of that was was brought up and then addressed this year, do you feel? Because I saw some sessions on it. Yeah, yeah, honestly, I'm kind of like I'm just done with it. Yeah, well, you know what? I don't blame you. That I think that that fatigue is is super real, and and maybe it's not even that people are getting scared out of it, it's that people are just going, you know what, I don't I don't want to do this anymore. Well, I I mean we participated, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 5:24

And we've got a hundred million dollar worth of Bede provisional award, just waiting for waiting for NTIA approval, and then we get a con and then we're gonna get contracts, and then we have to negotiate the contracts. But I'm prepared to walk away from all of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:37

If the contracts don't look right, if it doesn't look like something that's gonna be uh sustainable and has a bunch of gotchas in it, then what is there one thing that's happening with it that is like that's a non-starter right now that you feel like a lot of people are looking at going, man, if they do this, I'm out.

SPEAKER_01: 5:55

One of the things is the termination for convenience. There was talk that any government contract is gonna have that included in it. So that's convenient. Well, geez, I'm gonna insist if if they get it, I do too. Okay, yeah. That's why I'm gonna I'm gonna insist on that in my contracts. And if we don't get it, then I'll just walk away. There you go. Because like I this was all it yeah, it would be awesome to go build that, but it's also a giant chunk of work. If you're actually doing the job the right way and you're gonna go out and you're gonna meet the terms of the program, and you aren't trying to figure out some way to scheme your way out of it, it's a lot of work. It is a ton of work.

SPEAKER_00: 6:29

And for someone to be able to just walk away from that with you holding the bag, because you'd still be responsible for that for the contract or or some type of term or something at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01: 6:38

Well, the way I look at it, it's it a lot of it depends on the reimbursement schedule. Yeah. So if it's gonna be you coming out of pocket to do$100 million worth of work. Well, but I the the reimbursement should be, it should be you turn in invoices, get a reimbursement a few months later. Yeah. So then you're only on the hook for that. Yeah, for the work. If that's the way it works, yeah, we can accept it. Yeah. Um, but if they're expecting us to do all the work and then get paid at the end, it's like, hell no, that ain't happening.

SPEAKER_00: 7:04

What else, what are some of the other because I mean to me, that's that's the thing I keep watching over and over with with the FCC turnover and and and just the political situation in the US as it is, and you know, tariffs, I think tariffs hit some I talked to some companies that tariffs hit pretty hard here, and that doesn't make life easy for anybody. Yeah. Um were there what else was what else was the buzz about at the show? I mean, there was I don't feel like there were any new pro G2 obviously kind of steals a show uh and good for them for launching before the event. Although I do like I remember the days when products were launched here. Yeah that was always fun. You know, you'd walk in with you would walk away with like, oh my god, you know what I learned? You know, that was I would encourage any company listening who who's at Wispapalooza to do a product launch, man. Give us something, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 7:50

Yeah, you know the the hot word, the hot thing here, I think, is AI, which it seems like that's the hot word everywhere. Yeah, and you know, I've got I got a crazy guy from Canada who's setting all our stuff for AI. So we are setting up an entire you know section of our company that is going to use that to you know improve the way we run our network and interact with our customers and analyze our data. You know, that that is that's got huge payoffs, but you don't really need to say that much about it. Yeah, the thing I'm really excited about, and it might be another year before this like really fully catches on, but I'm really excited about the possibility of open access and fixed wirels. Really? So I was in on a session with that. That was something that never really was quite possible in the past because you know, if we go put up an access point and we've only got 100 to 200 meg to work with, or we can only handle like 20, 30 customers tops, there isn't enough uh, there isn't enough capacity, there isn't enough reliability, and there's not enough potential on that to really make that work at a big scale. Okay. I think Toronto's kind of flipped the script on that. Okay. So a a G1 Toronto that can handle 200 customers, a G2 that can handle 500, yeah, and in a really reliable way that's going to be scalable, predictable. Toronto's setup, you can have multiple network IDs on it, so multiple operators can operate off of it. We are working on a project, we are doing that with another operator. It's amazing, and it's been fantastic, you know, because this what what it does for us is we're working with this other operator, and now we don't have to try and compete for tower space for backbone. That's right. We're on the same tower, we're using the same backbone. Uh, we we exchange our traffic at uh an IX, uh-huh, and I don't have to go out and upgrade all these tower sites. I go upgrade the customers. And so I think that's gonna open up an entirely new class of Wisps. Uh-huh. I think we're gonna start to see Wisps that specialize in their regional area. And I think a lot of guys are gonna look at this and it's like, why would I give up the margin? You know, because I think it's gonna be you know somewhere between$20 and$30 a month to access this for a customer. But if you run the numbers on what it takes to run a really good network, especially a high quality one like a Toronto network, that's in the neighborhood of what it costs to do that. Yeah. And if you don't have to stand up your own staff, if you're if you're really good at selling and you've got a niche market that you can sell to, and you've got that entrepreneurial energy to go out and market and sell and support customers in your community, um, and you don't have to build network, all you do is build that relationship with the customer, that opens up an entirely new class. Do you remember the dish uh dish network installers? Yeah, of course. Back in the day, Dish Network had all these entrepreneurial installers and they went out and they installed customers like crazy. That's right. And then Dish basically put them all out of business because they took away their recurring revenue and they took away their commissions and brought in their own installers to do all that. I think we have an opportunity to unlock that entrepreneurial energy and get it, would not surprise me if two years from now we've got another two or three thousand wisps and they're little tiny guys and they're running off open access networks and innovating like crazy in all kinds of different things.

SPEAKER_00: 11:18

Man, you know, years ago, uh a gentleman I met named Kai Wolf. It's just crazy to think about Kai. Kai was doing work with TV White Space, he was doing work in in Kenya and in Africa. He had moved to South Texas, and that's where I met him, because he saw opportunity for development down there. And when I got together and started talking to Kai, he realized that I was in the wireless industry and we started talking about stuff that he did. And when he deployed Google Wi-Fi networks in Kenya, the idea, his his big idea was that he could go build out a Wi-Fi network that was paid for by either the government or by the community or by the vendor, and then he would lease out the SSIDs on that network to local people who wanted to start their own ISP. Yeah. And and that was, you know, 15 years ago that Kai was doing that. It was amazing. And I have I've I've written blog after blog. I think I've got like three or four blogs I've written specifically about this in the Wi-Fi space because I was challenged one time by the mayor of our community who said, How do we figure out how to make more money with the investments that we've already made? He's like, We've already we have roads, we have infrastructure, how do we do it? And we have a pretty substantial network in South Texas and McAllen, and it's running, it's all Cambium, CBRS, it's got a thousand APs deployed. How do how can we take more advantage of that? And I said, Look, you make it easy. You open it up, and you have people, you know, the city maintains the network, they maintain the infrastructure, but they open it up to a local community and say, look, if you want to be a service provider on this network, submit an RFP. Tell me what would make you a good service provider. Do you do educational discounts, do you do free Wi-Fi for students, and then you charge, you know, on the back end, or do you do a 30-second advertisement before they get on? Have the community solicit RFPs to provide open access for community networks. I had never thought about doing it, and my mind started running a million miles per hour when you started talking about it. Imagine if Crown Castle or American Tower or some entrepreneurial group said, I'm just gonna build out Torana networks all over the US with the sole purpose of letting people lease space on them. That's incredible, man.

SPEAKER_01: 13:16

So we have a group that's working on that. That's incredible. And I'm I think I'm slow to the race, but I'm getting it. We're trying to build like some models. So, like in uh the cellular market, that's that's how you got roaming on cellular networks. Yeah. And they established a clearinghouse where a third party to kind of make sure that you didn't have disputes. Yeah because it starts to get really. I've got one guy I'm working with and it's working good. We trust each other. But that's when there's four of you. But when there's four and then there's 40, and then there's 400, and you've got all these different network operators, you need somebody that's gonna be sitting in the middle. It's gonna be like, okay, you you had this many users on this guy's networks, you owe that much for that, and you had this many users that you were were uh selling to other people. And so you get this much of that. And you're consuming 10 times the bandwidth of this guy, and right, but we balance it. We need to have a clearinghouse there that establishes the standards, establishes the interaction, uh, establishes the APIs for the interaction and how everything connects. What a fun next step for the industry. Yeah, so I'm excited about that because that is exciting. That's yeah, I I'm I'm picturing. Because then you're gonna have, then you're I I I do think what it's gonna do, it's probably gonna push their most wisps, started out having to do everything. Everything. I was literally when I started, I was literally building all the calluses, you know. I was building radios in my garage. Yeah, you know, I would take up and get some lucid cards in and load Star OS on it, and then I'd climb up and put it on top of a grain leg and mount the antennas and point the backhauls and try to figure out how to make all that stuff work. But that's it's beyond me. Yeah, and it's in some ways, you know, yeah, you can go set up a little, a little network somewhere, but setting up like a big, actual, solid carrier grade network that is gonna deliver and have SLA quality service on it that's not gonna be deal with interference and changing channels all the time and has a professional team. All you have to do is just is just operate. Yeah, because there'll be a class of operators. You know, at first I was like looking at that, it's like, you know what? If I just have to put the tower up, yeah, and a bunch of other people are selling on it, and I just get, you know, I just get the revenue off of it, I'm just a little positive, like right there. Totally.

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

You know, and it I remember it feels like you know, years ago, 15 years ago or so, there was that there was all that hot consolidation going on where all the wisps were just eating each other up and and going, you know, the the birth of what was the one that sold to the guys in Colorado who sold to Vivent, um not Rush. Rise. Rise, Rise, Rise, you know, when all those groups came around and started doing that, maybe we're on the precipice of that with something like this, where someone comes and just gobbles them all up just to get the towers and the infrastructure. That's not a bad model. It's a long play.

SPEAKER_01: 15:59

Well, here's the thing. I I think it actually makes it so we don't have quite as much gobbling up. Yeah. I think a small guy that's like looking at it's like, all right, I got You can offload the towers and I got five or six hundred customers, but I've got old technology, and I don't have the cash flow to go out and upgrade to the city.

SPEAKER_00: 16:15

I'm willing to sell to company XYZ. Well, no, no, here's enough to sell. Well, no, no, no. I'm willing to sell that part to Company XYZ so that they can take a percentage and I still keep my customers. I'm still able to give them a value add.

SPEAKER_01: 16:27

Oh man. I was in a session, the session we were talking about open access. Um, this guy had a perfect example. He's like, Yeah, we've got, we call it the C VRS, you know, range war. And it's because we're on the same towers trying to put stuff up, competing. And I said, Look, are you better at selling, are you better at running the network, or are you better at selling to customers? He says, We're better at customer service, they're better at running the network. Good. I said that what you need to do is work out a deal with them, have them run the network, shut your stuff down, and split the profits, let them run the network, you go out and take care of the customers, and then you're you aren't paying two tower rents, you aren't paying for you know two sets of equipment, that's the same. You don't have the headaches that you used to have, and you just focus on what you're good at.

SPEAKER_00: 17:10

And I okay, well, my question is is that because we're getting older and we're realizing that you know, I feel like I had this conversation with Dennis earlier where it's like sometimes it's okay to just have slices of the pizza instead of having to go out and make the pizza so that you have the whole pizza. Right. You know, is that is that because generationally we're we're stepping into a phase where all of us are, you know, aging a little bit. We don't look it, right? But we're getting older and we're realizing that you know what, maybe the best way to do stuff is to work together, and maybe it's better to have three slices of great pizza than a whole shitty pizza, you know? I don't know, man. I don't know. Thanks for listening. That was my interview with Matt Larson, the chairperson of the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association and owner of VistaBeam Internet. That was such a fun conversation. It was great to see him and great to catch up. What a thought provoking conversation. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Jump on my LinkedIn, jump on our YouTube, send me an email, let me know. I'm curious as to what people think about open access networks for wireless and fiber internet service providers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.