Fatbeam LLC, a young broadband Internet service provider based in Post Falls, recently signed contracts totaling more than $2 million with two North Idaho school districts to provide their facilities with high-speed Internet access, company President Greg Green says.

Fatbeam inked the Post Falls school district to a 10-year agreement and the Coeur d'Alene school district to five years, with an option for the latter to renew for an additional five years.

Green, a telecommunications industry veteran here for nearly 30 years, says the 15-month-old company now has signed a total of about $7 million worth of contracts to provide high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connectivity to customers across the Inland Northwest.

Fatbeam was founded in mid-2010 and operates out of a 900-square-foot space at 971 S. Clearwater Loop, in Post Falls. It employs five people including Green, he says. He adds that the company contracts with Spokane Ditch & Cable to install its fiber-optic transmission cables.

Green says the company's service contracts mostly are with school districts in population centers with 100,000 people or less.

Aside from its newest signings, Fatbeam also has contracts to provide high-speed Internet service to school districts in Yakima and Sunnyside, Wash., Green says.

A press release issued by the company regarding its recent service agreements asserts the new connection will provide high-speed Internet access that formerly wasn't available to the districts.

Green says Fatbeam's operating model is to enter new markets by first providing fiber-optic Internet connections to school districts in small cities and towns in the Northwest. Once the company's fiber lines are installed, he says Fatbeam can branch off those lines to provide service to other customers.

"Initially, we enter a market by signing a contract with the school district; that particular customer is what we'll call our anchor tenant," he says.

He says an example of that working model is an agreement Fatbeam entered to provide Internet connectivity to a fire station in Coeur d'Alene that arose after the company installed fiber lines to the school district there.

He says other clients the company seeks to provide its services to include hospitals, businesses, and other Internet service providers who would lease capacity from Fatbeam's lines to resell to their customers.

Green says Fatbeam currently is working to provide service to the University of Idaho Research Park, in Coeur d'Alene, and the TierPoint LLC data center, in Liberty Lake.

Another avenue Fatbeam uses to land new clients is a partnership with a Post Falls-based company called Ednetics Inc. that operates out of the same 32,000-square-foot building as Fatbeam.

Ednetics is owned by Shawn Swanby, who's also a co-founder and co-owner of Fatbeam, and provides information-technology equipment and related services for school districts, Green says. The company also serves as a sales agent for Fatbeam's services.

Prior to his involvement in Fatbeam, Green helped to form the telecommunications company that's now known as XO Communications and founded OneEighty Networks Inc., which was acquired by Avista Corp. in the late 1990s and later sold by Avista in 2001.