Growth at the speed of Greenlight

Fifteen years after it began stringing fiber-optic cable through Rochester neighborhoods, Greenlight Networks is hitching its fortune to a telecom giant.

On April 28, T-Mobile announced an agreement to invest roughly $2 billion for a 50% stake in a new joint venture with Oak Hill Capital that combines Greenlight with fellow Oak Hill portfolio company GoNetspeed under T-Mobile’s T-Fiber brand. Greenlight will continue operating as the company that designs, builds and services the network under the new brand.

The deal could supercharge Greenlight’s already robust growth. It also brings questions, among them: What will its growth—and its new ownership structure—mean for the region that built it?

The agreement with T-Mobile is just the latest of several key moves for Greenlight. In 2022, Oak Hill took a controlling stake in Greenlight with a $300 million investment and began backing an acquisition strategy. A deal to buy Loop Internet closed Oct. 1, 2025, giving Greenlight its first Pennsylvania hub; acquisition of FastBridge Fiber was announced last November and closed this July, adding more than 65,000 household passings—where fiber optic cable runs down the street or along property lines—in Buffalo and Pennsylvania.

Then came T-Mobile. The joint venture with Oak Hill was one of two fiber deals the nationwide broadband and 5G provider revealed that day, part of a stated goal of reaching 3 million to 4 million fiber customers nationally by 2030. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

For their part, Greenlight and GoNetspeed combined are expected to pass roughly 1.3 million homes by the end of this year, employing about 1,100 people across the Northeast, including roughly 160 in the Rochester region. Companywide, that workforce is made up of about 250 longtime Greenlight employees, another 120 who joined through the FastBridge acquisition, and 700 more expected once GoNetspeed joins the venture.

Building wasn’t enough

Mark Murphy founded Greenlight in 2011 after a homebuilder friend asked him to wire fiber into the new houses he was constructing. Murphy, a telecom veteran who had worked at Time Warner Cable and Frontier and wanted to run his own company, figured other builders would see the same appeal in fast internet as a selling point, and he was right.

Financed at first by Murphy and a small group of local investors, Greenlight began selling 1-gigabit fiber service in 2012, largely confined to Rochester neighborhoods east of the Genesee River, where the cost of construction and the logistics of getting on utility poles owned by Rochester Gas and Electric were more manageable for a startup with limited capital.

The business grew, but its pace wasn’t fast enough to get Greenlight established before Charter Communications (Spectrum) or Frontier might invest in fiber networks of their own.

In 2018, Tom Golisano—the Paychex founder and Rochester philanthropist known for building one of the region’s most successful companies from scratch—invested $100 million for a majority stake in what was then still a single-city operation. The money let Greenlight push construction beyond Rochester’s west side into new neighborhoods, and within a few years into the Buffalo-Niagara region and the Southern Tier. Oak Hill Capital, a private equity firm, succeeded Golisano as majority investor in 2022.

For most of Greenlight’s history, growth meant building—entering new neighborhoods one at a time (Greenlight employees would knock on doors to gauge interest), weighing customer density against the combined costs of construction and stringing fiber. Erik Keith, a broadband-infrastructure analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, says that pattern is typical of how independent fiber providers get started: A local incumbent declines to invest in fiber in a given market, leaving an opening for a startup willing to build block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, wherever demand showed up first.

“That’s the absolute best way to build a business like this,” he says.

And it’s what eventually gave Greenlight the track record to expand into Buffalo and beyond. Murphy says Greenlight still sees roughly 3 million homes within its long-term construction roadmap, based on federal broadband data the company reviews every six months, but organic growth alone wouldn’t get it there. Loop Internet brought in-house construction expertise Greenlight lacked at comparable scale; FastBridge added markets in Buffalo and Pennsylvania the company had already targeted.

“In the case of FastBridge and Loop, those are markets where we did want to build,” Murphy says. “After meeting with their management teams and subsequently with the investors, it just made a lot of sense to bring them all together.” In both cases, he adds, the sellers’ investors were looking for an exit—a reflection, too, of pole access being largely first-come, first-served. “Once you apply to get on a pole, you’re first in line,” he says. “If you’re second in line, that’s not as exciting or as attractive.”

Employees from both acquisitions integrated quickly, says Murphy, describing a visit to the Pennsylvania and Buffalo offices the Monday after the FastBridge deal closed. “I was blown away by the enthusiasm of the employees there.”

He expects a similar process with GoNetspeed, though he says the company is still working through details—most of the work so far has gone into aligning back-end systems rather than day-to-day operations.

“Frankly, most of our work up to now has been on the systems side, because that’s the longer pole in the tent,” he says. Once the venture is official, he adds, it should mean more resources for employees on both sides and continued investment in the platforms his teams use.

Scale, consolidation, and the customer question

Building fiber remains extraordinarily capital-intensive, and independent “overbuilders” that spent the past decade racing to construct competing networks are increasingly giving way to consolidation. An AlixPartners survey found roughly two-thirds of fiber operators have reduced or halted new-market expansion, and analysts at New Street Research have argued that multiple fiber providers competing in the same market often struggle to generate acceptable returns—part of why capital is consolidating around fewer, larger platforms like the venture between T-Mobile and Oak Hill.

That consolidation wave is exactly what concerns Sean Gonsalves, associate director for communications at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, which has tracked broadband markets for 18 years. Gonsalves said the pattern nationally—large, well-capitalized providers buying independent fiber operators rather than building networks from scratch themselves—could consolidate markets, reduce competition, and eventually put upward pressure on prices. He doesn’t fault independent operators for selling—a big payout can be a legitimate way for an owner to cash out after years of building a company—but he says the pattern after these deals is fairly consistent: things stay the same at first, then prices rise and satisfaction ratings slip.

“It would be good to go back and check in a year or two,” he says.

Gonsalves also pushed back on any notion that Greenlight is a small operation being squeezed toward a sale, noting it already operates across multiple cities and markets—a distinction, he notes, that doesn’t ease his broader worry about consolidation. A multimarket seller under no particular distress, in his view, fits the pattern he’s concerned about just as much as a struggling one would.

Asked about what customers will experience, Murphy points to Greenlight’s Consumer Reports ranking as evidence that transparent pricing and customer-friendly practices have let Greenlight win share regardless of incumbents’ presence. The company topped Consumer Reports’ national ISP satisfaction survey with a score of 95 out of 100 in both 2024 and 2025, well ahead of every other provider rated.

Gonsalves argues that being first to market with fiber, as Greenlight was in Rochester, is a genuine advantage, since fiber remains the most reliable broadband technology available. But in his view, even two fiber providers in a market isn’t enough for competition to function properly; a market generally needs three or more fiber providers before customers have real leverage.

Murphy traces Greenlight’s customer-first posture to a specific frustration with how cable companies treat frontline workers. When a customer calls a retention desk threatening to cancel, he says, the standard playbook is to say no—until the customer actually leaves, at which point a “welcome back” offer with 50%-off pricing shows up in the mail days later.

“By taking those things away and really empowering our frontline people to make decisions in the best interest of the customer, I think that’s what makes us different,” he says, arguing that pricing games and missed appointments ultimately land on the technicians and service reps who have to face angry customers, not on executives.

Looking south, and enter T-Mobile

Pennsylvania has become the centerpiece of Greenlight’s geographic expansion because, Murphy says, New York’s remaining buildable territory is increasingly sparse and costly to reach, while Pennsylvania offered denser, growing metro areas, fewer entrenched competitors, and easier regulatory terrain. The company had looked hard at Reading and Williamsport before the Loop and FastBridge acquisitions gave it a real foothold there—Loop’s Wyomissing hub has been passing homes at a pace Murphy says trails only Rochester itself among Greenlight’s markets. The company has committed $62 million to the Lehigh Valley alone.

Greenlight’s reach extends to Maryland—and Murphy singles out Baltimore as the biggest surprise of the firm’s southward expansion.

“Baltimore has had a tougher reputation in terms of the business community,” he explains, “but the mayor’s office has been really good to work with. They’ve been looking for somebody to come in and build there.”

Backed by a planned $100 million investment, Greenlight has completed construction in the Mount Washington neighborhood and is actively building in other neighborhoods like Roland Park, Hampden, and Glen, with about 6,000 homes and businesses already able to connect.

If acquisitions solved Greenlight’s expansion problem, Murphy believes T-Mobile solves its branding problem—the harder challenge, he says, of entering markets where nobody has heard of the company. “What they spend on brand in a day is probably more than a couple years of our marketing budget,” he notes, referring to T-Mobile’s “big magenta T.”

Under the joint venture, T-Mobile will market fiber service under its national T-Fiber brand while Greenlight focuses primarily on designing, constructing and operating the network—giving Greenlight “air cover” to enter new markets, Murphy says, instead of building brand awareness from zero each time. He points to “convergence” products bundling wireless and fiber service as a longer-term opportunity—”new ways for people to communicate that we certainly haven’t thought about yet.”

He insists that customers should notice little operational change beyond new branding. “The same people that show up to somebody’s house to do an install or a repair are just going to be wearing a different color shirt,” he says, adding that the joint venture agreement includes specific customer-service performance requirements T-Mobile set for Greenlight to meet. “It’s not like T-Mobile is expecting us to stop paying attention to the customers. We’re going to have even more metrics than we had before to follow, keep track of, and make sure we’re still there on time and we’re still fixing things the first time we’re there.”

The partnership reflects a shift in how Murphy thinks about Greenlight itself. Asked whether Greenlight is ultimately a fiber company or a connectivity company, he offers a different answer: “We’ve become an infrastructure company.” Under the joint venture, Greenlight expects to pivot increasingly toward business-to-business customers while T-Mobile absorbs much of the consumer-facing relationship. Murphy credits Oak Hill, which also holds a stake in roughly a half-dozen similar fiber companies including GoNetspeed, with providing both capital and operating patience through that growth. “They really understand the business and they really understand the issues that pop up,” he says.

What T-Mobile actually wants

Murphy’s version of the deal centers on branding and “air cover.” Erik Keith, the analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, sees the same transaction from the buyer’s side, and his read fills in a piece Murphy’s account leaves out: Fiber networks are increasingly valuable to wireless carriers as backhaul. Any 5G buildout needs fiber running to the towers and small cells, Keith says, and a company that already owns a fiber footprint in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut (Greenlight itself doesn’t operate there today, but will once GoNetspeed joins the combined platform) can put that same infrastructure to work for both fiber-to-the-home subscribers and T-Mobile’s fixed-wireless and cellular network—a dual purpose that makes Greenlight worth more to T-Mobile than its broadband subscriber count alone would suggest.

Keith also situates the deal in T-Mobile’s broader ambitions. Where Verizon grew out of the old Bell wireline system and later added wireless, he says, T-Mobile is building the reverse: a wireless-first carrier now assembling a nationwide wireline and fiber footprint to match. Scale matters because profitability in fiber broadband climbs once a network moves past a certain share of homes passed converted into paying subscribers—what the industry calls a take rate—and every additional point of penetration in an existing market like Rochester makes the whole platform more valuable to investors. And having operating networks across several states gives T-Mobile something to point to as it markets the platform nationally—proof of a working model rather than a plan on paper.

Keith’s overall read is more reassuring than Gonsalves’ about the deal’s structure, if not necessarily its long-run effect on price and service. Unlike a private-equity buyer looking to flip the business for a quick return, he says, a tier-one wireless carrier making a long-term infrastructure bet is “not a case of private equity pumping and dumping.” T-Mobile, in his view, is in this for the duration—which doesn’t resolve Gonsalves’ concern about what happens to pricing and customer satisfaction once competitive pressure eases, but does suggest Greenlight isn’t being acquired to be stripped for parts.

What Rochester should watch

Amit Batabyal, a Distinguished Professor and the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics at Rochester Institute of Technology, frames Greenlight’s trajectory as a familiar arc in regional economic development: local entrepreneurial formation, regional expansion, external capital, and now integration into a national platform. By 2021, he notes, Greenlight had invested more than $60 million locally, created more than 140 jobs and employed hundreds of local contractors—concrete evidence, in his view, that Rochester can produce companies with business models attractive enough to draw national capital. He distinguishes between value creation, which Rochester has clearly delivered, and value capture—how much of the ongoing economic benefit the region keeps going forward. His concern is that once a company joins a much larger platform, the location of ownership and the location of economic activity can start to diverge, with the highest-value decisions on strategy and capital allocation increasingly made elsewhere.

Batabyal points to five things worth tracking over time: whether Greenlight’s Rochester employment holds steady or grows; whether meaningful decision-making stays local; whether local supplier spending increases; whether university partnerships deepen; and whether Greenlight’s presence here starts generating spinoff companies.

He isn’t arguing that outside ownership is necessarily bad for Rochester. He’s supplying the questions. What Murphy says today, and what actually happens over the next several years, will supply the answers.

The strongest version of a good outcome, in his framing, looks less like Greenlight simply staying put and more like Greenlight fostering a local ecosystem around itself: engineers who leave to start their own firms; suppliers who expand to meet the company’s growing demand for network engineering, software, cybersecurity and telecommunications equipment; and university researchers who collaborate directly with the company. That’s the difference, he says, between Rochester having one successful company headquartered here and Rochester having a genuine regional economic institution.

He also situates Greenlight within a larger regional shift. Rochester, he argues, is better described today as an optics-photonics-imaging-engineering hub with telecommunications capabilities than as a traditional telecom hub—pointing to the Rochester-Finger Lakes region’s recent National Science Foundation-backed laser-technology hub initiative, which involves RIT, the University of Rochester, Monroe Community College and regional companies.

A familiar pattern in Rochester

Rochester has seen something like Greenlight’s growth path before.

RF Communications, a radio manufacturer founded in a Park Avenue basement in Rochester in 1960 by three engineers and a local attorney, gave up its local ownership when Harris Corp. acquired it in 1969. But the operation didn’t leave—it became Harris’ RF Communications Division, still headquartered in the same Rochester building, and grew into a multibillion-dollar business over the following decades. When Harris merged with L3 Technologies in 2019 to form L3Harris, the Rochester operation didn’t shrink into an outpost: L3Harris employs roughly 3,800 people in the region today and ranks as its largest manufacturer, spending more than $125 million annually with Rochester-area suppliers. Six decades after Rochester lost the company’s ownership, Rochester still has the jobs.

What Murphy says will stay

Asked directly, Murphy doesn’t describe Rochester becoming a satellite office. Henrietta-based staff already support construction and engineering projects across Greenlight’s entire multistate footprint, not just local ones—meaning Rochester functions today as an operating hub for the whole company, not merely its original market. GoNetspeed, Greenlight’s incoming sister company, already maintains a sizable Rochester presence of its own, adding to rather than replacing the local workforce. And the company’s investment in a workforce-training partnership with the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center, built to grow the region’s pipeline of fiber technicians, is a hard commitment to make if the plan were to wind local operations down.

Murphy points to the region’s long history in telecommunications, including his own time at Rochester Telephone, as creating one of the country’s deepest pools of engineering and geographic information system talent. He notes that Greenlight’s building sits directly in front of a T-Mobile office—close enough that the company’s landlord photographed the two buildings side by side with a drone during deal talks. “Rochester is always home,” he says.

The company points to local partnerships as evidence of that commitment: the REOC training collaboration; membership in the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce; service agreements with Monroe County and the Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport; and sponsorships including the Rochester Red Wings, the Rochester Americans, Foodlink’s holiday food drives, and the Seneca Park Zoo’s ZooBrew.

Asked what success ultimately looks like, Murphy doesn’t mention subscriber counts or miles of cable. Instead, he points to another Rochester company.

“I have often looked at Wegmans as a great role model for us,” he says. “They are obviously beloved here, and rightfully so, because of the differentiated experience they offer to their customers and the way they treat their customers.”

His ambitions for Greenlight’s growth are considerable: Within five years, he hopes, Greenlight will pass roughly 3 million homes across 14 states, a scale that’s a world away from the single Rochester neighborhood the company started in 15 years ago.

But for Murphy, becoming larger will be meaningful only if Greenlight remains the kind of company Rochester claims as its own.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. 

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