Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 10)

Saturday, March 31, 2007 Related Content Share/Send | 1 comment

As a telecommunications company focused on rural markets, Maggie’s challenges are quite different from the urban carriers. When we were scheduling this interview, Maggie absolutely insisted that she would not do it on Skype: “they try to take the food out of the mouth of my babies as a competitor” … In this segment, we’ll learn how she views Skype.

SM: It sounds like the rural market is not threatened by the kinds of services like Skype and JaJah which have played havoc with the mainstream telephone industry. MW: We do have customers that subscribe to those services, but it is not as prevalent as you would find in an urban area.

SM: You are much more insulated from that trend? MW: That is correct, and part of that has to do with that fact that a lot of our markets are very small. In many of our markets we are the number 1 or number 2 employer as well. In these markets, we have been there for 100 years. Our customers are our neighbors, and they are our relatives, and we have a very strong competitive advantage in providing a very high level of service to these customers over many years, in some very challenging areas, in terms of topography and from a weather perspective. The phone is the lifeline for people that live in low density areas.

SM: What percentage of rural America is broadband enabled? MW: I don’t really know the percentage across the board for all of rural America. I know that we are very aggressive in our percentage, as I said we are over 85% today.

SM: What percentage of the rural market place do you have? MW: We are probably a small percentage of all of rural America. We are the second largest, but there are 1500 independent telephone companies in the US. There is a consolidation that has started to happen in our business.

This segment is part 10 in a 14 part series Segment 11 →
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