I’ve visited a lot of service providers over the years. Most meetings start in an office, a conference room or somewhere that looks at least vaguely like a telecom business.

My first visit to Silo Communications wasn’t like that. The address took me out into rural northern Illinois, past cornfields and cattle, to a modest building with bucket trucks outside. It didn’t look like the HQ of a fast-growing broadband provider. But the longer I spent there, the more I realized that was exactly the point.

Silo wasn’t built in a boardroom. It was built in the same communities it serves by people who understood the problem firsthand. And that’s what makes this story worth telling.

Turning a local problem into a broadband business

Silo Communications began with a very familiar frustration: unreliable internet. Luke Grocholl and Wyatt Borchardt were looking for faster, more dependable connectivity for a home in rural northern Illinois. They were promised affordable gig-speed service, but the reality turned out to be far more expensive than expected.

For most people, that would have been the end of it. They would have complained, found a workaround and carried on. But Luke and Wyatt took it another way. If they were dealing with this problem, so were the farms, homes and businesses around them.

So they started building a solution. In early 2020, Silo began deploying fixed wireless access points on local silos, grain legs and towers. The company’s name isn’t marketing gloss. It points directly back to how the network began: using the structures already part of the rural landscape to connect the people living and working there.

By April 2020, just weeks after the pandemic began changing how people worked, learned and communicated, Silo connected its first broadband customers. At the exact moment reliable home internet became essential, they were already doing something about it.

It started with antennas on silos and has grown into a company that deploys fiber, creates local jobs and supports long-term opportunity.

One moment from those early conversations has always stayed with me. After that first visit, we met again over dinner to keep talking. Before we sat down, I asked Luke and Wyatt if they wanted a drink. They had to remind me they weren’t old enough.

That would be a good anecdote on its own. What made it remarkable was the conversation around it. We weren’t talking about a school project or a side hustle. We were talking about customers, construction equipment, financing, network design and a serious plan to expand broadband infrastructure. They were young, yes. But they had ambition, field knowledge and a clear understanding of what their community needed. That’s a rare combination.

From wireless provider to infrastructure builder

Silo’s early wireless network was only the beginning. As the company grew, Luke and Wyatt also began acquiring the practical capabilities needed to deploy infrastructure themselves. They invested in construction equipment, hired employees and developed a utility and fiber construction business alongside their internet service operation.

And if you know rural broadband, you know how much of it comes down to hard physical work. Permits. Trucks. Poles. Trenches. Fiber routes. Weather. Farms. Long distances. Small towns. Customers who know exactly who to call when something needs fixing.

Silo was learning all of that from the ground up. That hands-on experience gave the company a very different foundation for its next stage of growth.

Why fiber was the natural next step

Fixed wireless was the right place to start. It helped Silo reach homes and businesses quickly in areas that had been overlooked. But demand doesn’t stand still. Homes need more capacity. Farms rely on more connected systems. Businesses need dependable digital tools. Families expect streaming, remote work, online learning and video calls to simply work.

Fiber was the long-term answer.

For Silo, moving into fiber was about building the next layer: a network with the capacity, reliability and scalability to support what rural homes and businesses need now and in the future.

In and around Winnebago County, Silo has been putting that plan into action, building fiber infrastructure and connecting customers. Public funding has helped accelerate that opportunity, but it still takes local knowledge, field capability, the right technology and a team willing to do the hard work mile by mile.

Building on the right platform

Silo needed a platform it could grow with and people who understood what it takes to scale a rural network in the real world. At Adtran, we’ve worked closely with the team as they’ve moved from early planning to live fiber deployment.

The network combines our SDX access platform, optical network terminals, service delivery gateways, Mosaic Cloud Platform and Intellifi® connected home software. What that enables in practice is visibility, control and the ability to scale without losing operational control as the network expands.

More than broadband

In many rural areas, the story for younger generations is about getting away. Young folk leave for education, for work, for opportunity. Too often, they don’t come back because the opportunities are somewhere else. 

Silo is creating a different path. This is a company building technical skills, field experience and long-term jobs in the same places that needed better connectivity in the first place. Better broadband brings new capacity into a community. Silo shows how local providers can help turn that capacity into jobs, confidence and reasons to stay.

Why Silo stands out

We talk a lot in this industry about extending connectivity into underserved areas. It’s an important goal, but it can become abstract.

Silo makes it real. This is about farms that need better connectivity. Homes that rely on dependable service. Local businesses that can’t afford to fall behind. Young people who want a reason to stay and build something in the place where they grew up.

Silo Communications isn’t your average rural broadband story. It’s locally rooted, practical, ambitious and built from the ground up. It started with antennas on silos and has grown into a company that deploys fiber, creates local jobs and supports long-term opportunity.