NetSet owner gets kudos from premier
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/03/2017 (3099 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
NetSet Communications’ new corporate headquarters was brimming with activity Thursday as it marked its official grand opening.
Premier Brian Pallister attended the ribbon cutting at the state-of-the-art facility, located at 5 Granite Rd. on Brandon’s eastern outskirts.
“You can do anything for Manitoba if you work at it, and Mr. (Charlie) Clark and his team deserve a tremendous amount of praise for this,” Pallister said. “Mr. Clark has been a great contributor to the province for a long time. When you’re employing over a hundred people … but the services and the expansion of the broadband access is a really good thing for a lot of the province as well.”
Other dignitaries at the event included Progressive Conservative MLAs Reg Helwer (Brandon West), Len Iseifson (Brandon East), Greg Nesbitt (Riding Mountain) and Doyle Piwniuk (Arthur-Virden). Infrastructure Minister Blaine Pedersen and Mayor Rick Chrest were also in attendance, in addition to NetSet staff and other members of the community.
Chrest congratulated the team on finding the vision, seeing the opportunity in new technology and blazing a trail, “creating a lot of economic activity for a great many Manitobans, and Brandonites. We’re certainly glad that you are a Brandon company and growing very rapidly.”
NetSet Communications was founded in 2001 by CEO Charlie Clark. What began as a small company with a few staff members in a rented facility downtown, has grown to more than 120 staff members between its Brandon and Winnipeg sites. The company outgrew its previous Brandon location on Douglas Street.
“With the support of the municipal, the provincial and the federal governments, we’ve made some great progress in 16 years, and we’ve remained true to our passion to connect rural Manitoba,” Clark said. “Today we are recognized as one of the industry’s largest privately held telecommunications companies in Canada, and we’re very proud to have done this right here in Brandon, Manitoba.”
The company now provides high-speed Internet to more than 14,000 residents, small businesses and corporations across the province. It has 14 dealer groups and a 24-7 help desk that runs out of its head office.
“When our current expansion plan is complete later this year, we will blanket the province with more than 200 tower sites, all of which will be interconnected with fibre-optic cables, and fully licensed redundant microwave links,” Clark said.
The new headquarters was custom-built, and was the result of “extensive communications” with staff from every department, Clark said.
“The breadth and depth of NetSet is not entirely evident from within this building, the vast majority of our assets are actually out there in the countryside.”
» jaustin@brandonsun.com
» Twitter: @jillianaustin