Business opportunities often arise when entrepreneurs see a customer need to be served.
Mindy Flint, her brother-in-law, Mike Kunz, and two others started Bee Creek Internet in 2001 to meet need for high-speed Internet service in the Hill Country.
“In 2000, a lot of people were moving out of Houston and the other big metropolitan areas to the Texas Hill Country and were building these big, beautiful homes,” said Flint, who’s now the minority owner of Bee Creek (Kunz is majority owner). “There was no internet connection other than dial up. There was a real need for people outside of the cities to have a better connection. We saw an opportunity in that with the growth in the Hill Country, and there wasn’t anyone doing it at that time.”
Locally owned and operated, Bee Creek serves Fredericksburg, Stonewall, Comfort, Morris Ranch, Kerrville, Harper, Boerne, Fair Oaks, Sisterdale, Bergheim and Willow City.
“We cover all the outer areas,” Flint said. “Our biggest areas are not in town, but in the more rural areas.”
To those rural homes and businesses, they provide unlimited data, 24/7 access to a wireless connection with microwave communications that rebroadcast the signal from different commercial cell phone towers around the Hill Country.
Bee Creek puts a small dish on its clients’ houses, and the dish picks up signals wirelessly from one of its commercial rebroadcast towers.
Flint says the wireless internet service has changed a lot in some ways, but in other ways, not at all.
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