Founded in 2019, Crowsnest Broadband set out to fix a problem its founder kept running into: rural central Pennsylvania businesses were running solid technology on internet that couldn’t keep up. What began as a fixed wireless build-out on high terrain became a sprint when COVID hit — demand exploded, and Crowsnest grew from zero to nearly 3,000 subscribers, earning a five-star average across every social platform along the way. But that same explosive growth would soon push its network to the breaking point.

Network Pushed to Its Limits

The growth broke the network that enabled it. Crowsnest’s legacy 5 GHz gear held up at small scale, but as towers filled, the cracks became craters — and central Pennsylvania’s rough terrain amplified every weakness.

“Our legacy 5 GHz equipment was full and overflowing,” Zimmerman recalled. “Congested and noisy.”

Standing still wasn’t an option. Post-COVID, customers suddenly had real alternatives — Starlink’s 400 Mbps satellite plans, cable filling in parts of the footprint, and government funded fiber reaching deeper into rural markets. A botched migration risked undoing five years of trust. Crowsnest needed a platform proven in their terrain before committing a single subscriber to it.

The Skeptic’s Test

Zimmerman had heard about Tarana. He was skeptical. CBRS (3 GHz) appealed to a rural operator fighting trees and non-line-of-sight terrain, but early SAS licensing had been rocky. “I’m in Penn State country,” he said. “Can you imagine what would happen if SAS had an outage in the middle of a Penn State game? It would be the end of the world.”

So Crowsnest ran a deliberately brutal test: four Tarana base nodes on their worst towers — the busiest, loudest, most congested sites where nothing else worked.

“If you were ever to set up a product to fail, it would have been this test — because nothing else worked on those towers. And we put it up and it was like there wasn’t any noise there. It just didn’t care.”

— Dwayne Zimmerman, CEO/Founder, Crowsnest Broadband

The interference that had overwhelmed their legacy gear simply didn’t register. Tarana’s interference cancellation, including Asynchronous Burst Interference Cancellation (ABIC), cut through it. Even then, Zimmerman held those four towers in a live test for a full year before expanding.

Going All-In on CBRS

Once the FCC allowed SAS systems to maintain a timeout window — so a base node wouldn’t go dark the moment it lost its SAS heartbeat — Zimmerman committed. The mix of 3 GHz’s non-line-of-sight reach, tree penetration, and Tarana’s interference cancellation fit the terrain.

“We standardized on two plans: 100 Mbps and 400 Mbps. We can offer that at one mile and at ten miles, and it doesn’t really matter,” Zimmerman said. Capacity stopped being a daily worry: “Oh, we have Tarana there — you automatically have 400 Mbps.”

The terrain proved it. One favorite demo link sits 11 miles out, with 140 dB of path loss, definitively non-line-of-sight — and still returns 304 Mbps down / 75 Mbps up. “We rolled a truck thinking there’s no way this is going to be a go,” Zimmerman said. “And it was. She’s been a customer ever since.”

Driving Down Cost with G2

With CBRS solid, Crowsnest went after cost per connection. Their terrain demands 3 GHz, but 50 to 70 percent of subscribers are actually clear line of sight within six or seven miles — they just lacked a 6 GHz base node.

G2 solved it. A single node serves non-line-of-sight customers on two CBRS carriers and line-of-sight customers on two 6 GHz carriers at once — the latter on Tarana’s RNv remote node, at roughly half the cost of a standard RN and no CBRS spectrum fees. “SAS fees run about $3 per customer per month, and we don’t have those on 6 GHz,” Zimmerman said. “At scale, it’ll be huge savings.”

Early adoption wasn’t frictionless — Crowsnest hit G1-to-G2 differences and firmware issues — but Tarana’s support worked through them directly. Moving a fully loaded node from G1 to G2 delivered gains across the board:

• Peak RF utilization: dropped from 60–70% to 20–30%
• Peak speeds: rose from ~200 Mbps to 300–350 Mbps across all 91 remote nodes
• 6 GHz reach: an RNv link 9 miles out hit nearly 500 Mbps down / 100+ up — and 700/150 on multiband RNm — roughly double what competitors manage on 6 GHz

“Better path loss, better signal-to-noise, better speeds, better modulation — across all 90 customers, every single one we checked,” Zimmerman said.

Competing Head-to-Head with Cable

The days of being the only option are over, but Tarana gave Crowsnest the confidence to compete rather than just survive. When customers threatened to jump to Starlink, Crowsnest matched them: “We’d say, ‘We can roll a truck, upgrade you to Tarana, and you can get your 400 Mbps.’ And they stay.”

Upload has been the decisive edge. The largest cable provider in the footprint tops out at 50 Mbps upload on its highest tier — where Crowsnest’s entry-level Tarana plan begins. That’s driven real B2B growth, with some businesses dropping cable entirely.

“We’re not scared of cable,” Zimmerman said. “We’ll compete with cable all day long on our Tarana platform.”

Putting it All Together

Crowsnest went from zero to nearly 3,000 subscribers in under five years on customer service alone — then protected that reputation by refusing to migrate until Tarana proved itself. The result is a network they trust completely: 85% footprint coverage, consistent 100–400 Mbps at up to 11 miles, and a G2 architecture that adds capacity while cutting cost per connection.

“Where we have Tarana, we don’t need to worry,” Zimmerman said. “We know Tarana’s there and it’s going to work. We don’t even think about it.”

If you’re facing the same congestion, terrain, or competitive pressure Crowsnest was, get in touch with our sales team. We’d love to hear from you.