As ECFiber and the company that currently runs its operations continue to spar in court, the communication union district announced that its new service provider has hired its first chief executive officer.
Gopi Sundaram, a longtime investor in broadband projects, is taking the helm of the Vermont ISP Operating company, or VISPO, a nonprofit created by members of ECFiber’s board. The organization plans to take over ECFiber’s operations next year.
Sundaram currently serves as a managing partner at Radius Capital Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in telecommunications investments. Previously, he was the managing director of the Tetrad McCourt consortium, an investment group that helped oversee the deployment of Ireland’s National Broadband Plan.
“We were very happy to have Gopi join the VISPO board initially, and thrilled when he told us he’d be willing to become our CEO,” said VISPO board chair Alessandro Iuppa in a Thursday press release. “His expertise and deep experience gives VISPO the requisite leadership to manage and operate ECFiber.”
ECFiber is Vermont’s oldest communications union district — a type of municipal entity created by lawmakers in 2015 to support the rollout of high speed internet access in underserved parts of the state. (Founded in 2008 as an alliance of towns, ECFiber preceded, and served as a model for, other communications union districts in the state.) The district serves slightly fewer than 10,000 customers across 31 Vermont member towns and owns roughly 1,750 miles of fiber optic cable lines, according to its 2024 annual report.
Members of ECFiber’s governing board moved to take on VISPO as its new service provider in April as a simmering legal spat between the district and its current operating company, the Maine-based Biddeford Internet Corp (also known as Great Works Internet, or GWI) began to reach a boiling point.
GWI first took over operations for ECFiber in 2022, after a sequence of scandals led the district’s previous service provider ValleyNet, a nonprofit, to step back and ultimately dissolve in April, according to a business filing with the Vermont Secretary of State.
GWI also runs operations for two more of Vermont’s nine communications union districts — DVFiber and Northwest Fiberworx.
But in February, ECFiber accused GWI of starting to reorganize its operations in a way that would detract from the service provided to the district. GWI has meanwhile argued that VISPO was created on false pretenses, and that the communications district has violated their contract in attempting to abruptly transition between service providers.
In March, GWI launched a lawsuit against ECFiber’s governing board chair F.X. Flinn, claiming that the creation of VISPO was a maneuver orchestrated by Flinn “to literally poach GWI’s business and its opportunity with ECFiber for himself.”
Flinn, who was initially a founding director of the nonprofit operating company but has since stepped down, has strenuously denied the claims, arguing in court filings and in interviews that the lawsuit is a “SLAPP suit,” or a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, designed to intimidate ECFiber and complicate its transition to VISPO.
And in a flurry of legal filings made in recent months, the case has begun to escalate as GWI and ECFiber have accused one another of breaching their agreement.
In an amended complaint filed in mid-May, GWI broadened the scope of its initial lawsuit against Flinn by naming ECFiber itself as a codefendant. It also accused the communication union district of violating its contract, among other allegations.
ECFiber, meanwhile, has countersued, alleging that GWI has refused to cooperate as the district has attempted to begin shifting its operations to VISPO.
In May, ECFiber introduced a “transition policy” under which GWI would allow VISPO to gradually learn and take on all operating capabilities, from billing and bookkeeping to marketing and network management. Claiming that GWI has thus far refused to comply with the policy, ECFiber last week asked the court for a preliminary injunction requiring the company to cooperate, saying that the district would otherwise suffer “irreparable harm.”
In a written statement to VTDigger, however, GWI CEO Kerem Durdag said that the contract between the two entities “does not allow ECFiber to unilaterally impose such obligations” on GWI and that the company would say as much in court.
“ECFiber is attempting to force GWI to train, equip, and effectively subsidize a start-up competitor, without our consent, without compensation, and on an unrealistic timeline,” Durdag said. “That demand is not only unjust and unprecedented, it is deeply irresponsible. It would require pulling skilled GWI employees from other Vermont CUDs and would compromise the very viability of our operations.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of GWI’s CEO.
