Ryan Jenkins built ElektraFi in 2018 with the hopes of delivering reliable, high-speed internet to rural communities.

Expanding that service was a big reason Jenkins purchased Zirkel Wireless, which had been providing service to Steamboat Springs and Northwest Colorado for more than 20 years, in July 2024. Jenkins, who lives in Winter Park, said customers of the Colorado-based high-speed wireless internet company should expect the provider to rebrand as ElektraFi this spring.

“Our mission was to connect rural communities. I wanted to be able to deliver the same level of service, the same level of speeds and better customer service in rural areas that metro markets get,” said Jenkins. 

“Zirkel had built an excellent business, and an excellent network and fantastic customer service — I wanted to buy Zirkel and Grand County Internet and combine the two and be able to give the Northwest Colorado region a higher level of service as a combined business.”

Because of Zirkel’s strong reputation in the area, Jenkins said he has not needed to rush to rebrand the Steamboat Springs-based company, but that customers and residents should expect to see some of those changes coming this spring.

“If you drive by the building, we haven’t rebranded the building or the trucks,” Jenkins said. “Zirkel’s got a great brand reputation, and we just didn’t feel the need to make a huge change quickly — Zirkel’s got great brand reputation and fantastic reviews.”

He said in Routt and Grand counties, the idea was to upgrade the backbone of the network and have ElektraFi’s team provide improved customer service.

“We can provide a higher-level of customer service because we’re just a bigger team,” Jenkins said. “We’re able to provide 24/7 operations because we’re bigger, versus a lot of these smaller operations where you’ve got two or three folks doing customer care, and it’s more 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.”

In Routt and Moffat counties ElektraFi has upgraded the backbone of the system, but Jenkins said the “final mile” has remained largely the same. In Grand County, the company spent a lot of money upgrading the final mile to deliver near-gigabit or gigabit speeds in most of the company’s coverage area.

Jenkins said ElektraFi employs many redundant paths in the counties it serves, and because the service is wireless the load can be shifted between counties when needed.

“Let’s say that a backhoe takes out the main fiber line that feeds Steamboat, which all of the major providers run on. We can actually shift load to come out of our Craig facility, or come out of Oak Creek, and then next year (we will be able to) come out of Kremmling,” Jenkins said,

He said this flexibility also allows ElektraFi to react to situations like the holiday surge that many towns, including Steamboat Springs, experience during the busy holiday season, or whenever the number of users suddenly increases in an area.

Jenkins said that ElektraFi scores highly in a Net Promoter Score survey where the high-speed internet provider netted a 35. A score between 30 and 70 reflects strong customer loyalty and is considered very good in the industry.

Jenkins also understands the importance of providing reliable service to rural communities and towns like Steamboat Springs where locals depend on reliable internet service, visitors expect it and business demands it. He said that is why ElektraFi has built-in redundancies — but he admits that even with those redundancies there are occasional hiccups. Last week, Jenkins said, ElektraFi had a “Priority 3” outage that affected fewer than 29 customers. His company was able to resolve the issues in less than 20 minutes, but for many of ElektraFi’s customers — including businesses that need to run credit cards — Jenkins would like to all but eliminate such issues.

“When you’re running a business on the internet, you need to have our service and a secondary service because nobody’s perfect,” Jenkins said. “We do our best, and we have an incredibly high up-time rating, but stuff happens.”