Packy McCormick doesn't just profile an entrepreneur; he diagnoses a global infrastructure rot and presents a radical, vertically integrated cure. The piece's most startling claim isn't about a new startup, but that the entire telecommunications industry has become a victim of its own financial engineering, leaving the door open for a company to rebuild the physical internet from the ground up. This is not a story about better marketing; it is a technical and financial argument that the incumbents are sitting ducks, and the evidence lies in a cost-per-homepass disparity that defies conventional wisdom.
The Architecture of Obsolescence
McCormick frames the narrative around Forrest Heath, III, not as a typical tech founder, but as an infrastructure architect who sees the world's physical networks as fundamentally broken. The author writes, "Words are lossy. It's taken me a year... to put that feeling on paper." This admission sets the stage for a deep dive into a business model that is difficult to explain but impossible to ignore once understood. McCormick argues that traditional telecom giants have atrophied their engineering muscles, outsourcing innovation to vendors like Cisco and Nokia, which locks them into expensive, cyclical hardware upgrades.
The core of the argument rests on the concept of "Active Ethernet" borrowed from data centers, a stark contrast to the Passive Optical Network architecture used by incumbents. As McCormick puts it, "Whereas traditional telecommunications networks are physically complex, requiring expensive hardware that needs to be upgraded every 3-5 years, Somos' network is physically simple and pushes complexity to software." This distinction is crucial: it shifts the burden of innovation from the physical layer, which is hard to change, to the software layer, which is agile and cheap to update. This reframing of the industry's biggest cost center is the piece's most compelling insight.
The financial implications are staggering. McCormick notes that while incumbents in the US pay between $500 and $1,000 to pass a single home with fiber, Somos is achieving this for just $20. "Incumbents not only pay more, they pay more for worse networks," he observes, highlighting how legacy carriers sacrifice speed and reliability to maintain margins through signal splitting. By building its own hardware and writing its own firmware, the company avoids the vendor lock-in that plagues the sector. This approach allows for a product that is not only cheaper but technically superior, offering 1-2 Gbps speeds at a fraction of the market price.
"It's been this never-ending game of doing something janky, getting credibility, doing crazier stuff, getting more resources, getting smarter people so that we can fix the things that were messed up in the janky past iteration."
McCormick draws a parallel to the early days of cable television, referencing the financial engineering of John Malone, the architect of TCI and Liberty Media. He notes that Malone's strategy was a "virtuous cycle" of buying more systems to gain scale, which generated cash flow to buy even more. However, McCormick suggests that the modern iteration of this cycle is broken because the incumbents are trapped in a "never-ending race against decay." The historical context of Malone's consolidation adds weight to the argument: if the industry was once built on aggressive expansion, it is now paralyzed by the very scale it achieved. Critics might note that the capital intensity of building physical infrastructure remains a massive barrier to entry, regardless of the architectural advantages, and that scaling this model globally is a logistical nightmare far beyond the scope of a single startup.
From Bits to Electrons
The narrative expands beyond internet service to a broader vision of energy infrastructure. McCormick describes Heath's ambition to leverage Colombia's hydroelectric potential to solve transmission bottlenecks, effectively merging the worlds of data and power. "First internet, then power. The substrates of the modern world," the author writes, capturing the scope of the vision. This vertical integration is not just about efficiency; it is about creating a self-sustaining ecosystem where the company controls the entire value chain, from the power plant to the router in the home.
The piece highlights the unique environment of Medellín, where the density of the population and the availability of hydro resources create a perfect testing ground. McCormick writes, "Medellín was just a great place to start because of how bad the alternatives are, how strong the talent pool is, how much easier it is to build, how dense it is, and how rich the hydro resources in the surrounding areas are." This contextualizes the strategy: it is not a generic solution, but one tailored to specific geographic and economic conditions. The author's description of Heath's interactions with local gang leaders and his casual demeanor in high-stakes meetings adds a layer of human texture to the technical analysis, illustrating the unique challenges of building infrastructure in volatile regions.
However, the argument glosses over the political and regulatory complexities of operating in Latin America. While the technical and financial models are sound, the ability to navigate local governance and security issues is a variable that cannot be fully engineered away. McCormick acknowledges the "janky" nature of the early iterations, but the leap from a local success story to a global infrastructure empire requires a level of political capital that may not be as easily acquired as technical innovation.
"The network improves as it grows, which is unique to the architecture, and is cheap and easy to upgrade."
This quote encapsulates the promise of the model: a system that becomes more valuable and efficient with scale, rather than more fragile. It challenges the conventional wisdom that infrastructure is a static, decaying asset. Instead, it proposes a dynamic system that adapts and improves, much like software. This is the "fission process" McCormick describes, where each success fuels the next, creating a momentum that could potentially disrupt the global market.
Bottom Line
McCormick's strongest move is reframing the telecom industry not as a mature, stable sector, but as a decaying monopoly ripe for disruption through architectural innovation. The argument is compelling because it is grounded in specific, verifiable cost disparities and a clear technical alternative to legacy systems. Its biggest vulnerability lies in the assumption that the logistical and political hurdles of global infrastructure deployment can be overcome with the same agility as software development. Readers should watch for the company's ability to scale this model beyond Colombia, as the transition from a local success to a global player will test the limits of its "vertical integration" thesis.
"It's a self-sustaining fission process."
The piece succeeds in making the reader see the physical world of cables and routers as a dynamic, upgradable system rather than a static utility. It is a rare glimpse into a future where the infrastructure of the modern world is rebuilt from the ground up, driven by a combination of technical brilliance and relentless execution.