Ben Edmond spent a decade solving a problem the industry didn’t consider a problem—until AI made it one. Before AI fully entered the scene, he had a job where getting a route wrong was unsurvivable.
As President of Sales and Marketing at FiberLight, he led long-haul builds funded by prepayment at capital scale. Those deals work on a simple and unforgiving logic: The customer covers most of the construction cost up front in exchange for a rate that assumes you priced the route correctly. Get the market wrong, get the cost wrong, or misjudge who else could serve those buildings, and the build is underwater before the first splice. So, he learned to think about connectivity the way a builder does—as a question about specific ground, specific buildings, specific competitors—in an industry that mostly talked about it as a question about brands.
The problem he kept running into was not technical. Deals were lost to suppliers nobody found, rates nobody benchmarked, and responses that arrived a week after the deadline. Every one of those failures had the same root: Nobody could see the market. Operators managed their own footprints in spreadsheets and KMZ files, emailed between sales teams, versioned by whomever saved last. A carrier could tell you it served a building. It could rarely tell you which entrance, at what interval, at what cost—and it could tell you almost nothing about the buildings next door.
Edmond founded a company in 2015 in West borough, Massachusetts, under a name that described the ambition narrowly: Connected2Fiber. The first product was a map you could trust.
