Bryce Daniel takes over management of Lincoln Telephone

Following the retirement of Aaron Daniel at the end of October, LincTel has a new General manager, Bryce Daniel.

Bryce Daniel, who had been offered the position about a week before his father accepted an early retirement offer, took over the position on Nov. 1.

'We'd been gearing up for it, but it was a pretty quick transition," Daniel said. The planned transition had been in the works for several months.

"I'm excited to take over. I've been here for more than 13 years," he said. "I still have quite a few years ahead of me. I'll hopefully be here until retirement. I'll really look at keeping Lincoln Telephone local and community minded. That's really what our board members now are really focused on. I want to keep that going as long as I'm here."

Daniel has hit the ground running in his new position, tackling an upcoming Connect MT grant application that could help LincTel expand its service area throughout the Canyon Creek area and towards the Helena Valley.

"That application process is coming January 26. We have two months to apply. It's a pretty thorough process, so I'm getting engineers involved right now," he said.

The grant funds are designed to help provide broadband access to areas that are considered frontier and have no service, or are under served, where customers have less than 25 megabytes of download and three megabytes of upload.

"We're looking to do the same thing we did for Lincoln in Canyon Creek. Fiber to the home, using all the same contractors. similar project. I believe you have five years to complete it," Daniel said.

He said they're also looking at an ongoing federal ReConnect grant program that received more funding through the recently passed infrastructure bill

"There isn't as much funding in there, but it's another program we're looking at to expand our business," he said, adding the goal is to expand into other under served areas like Marysville, Silver City and Birdseye.

"We have a lot fo customers in that area who inquired about service in the past. It's been too expensive for us to get into those areas. There isn't the density we'd like, so the grant program would really help us get into those areas."

Daniel, who said LincTel was pretty forward thinking with its fiber optic installation work, which was completed locally at the end of 2019, and earned them a "pat on the back" from the Montana Telephone Association last month. "We were the first company – we're fairly small compared to some of the other ones – to be 100 percent fiber to the home. We were pretty aggressive with it. We did it in two years."

Looking ahead, Daniel said it's hard to predict where technology will go, but in terms of fiber optic speed, "technically nothing is faster than the speed of light." The rapid expansion of cloud computing and storage affected some of LincTel's plans for 'over-the-top' services, and he said its hard to invest in those technologies right now, since they're a small business and there isn't the demand or need for it in Lincoln yet. However, they are looking at growing their bandwidth capacity to offer better packages, as well as brining more business services in for their current and futures service areas.