Skybeam, LLC

Skybeam, LLC — company profile

Skybeam, LLC is a Colorado limited liability company headquartered at 61 Inverness Drive East, Englewood, CO. It operates under the consumer brand Rise Broadband and is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of JAB Wireless, Inc., which was rebranded as Rise in 2015. JAB/Rise was founded in 2005–2006 by Jeff Kohler and other executives and consolidated several rural wireless ISPs (Skybeam, Digis, Prairie iNet, T6, Rhino Communications). In February 2023, private-equity firm GI Partners completed its acquisition of Rise Broadband/JAB Wireless (via GI DI Iris Acquisition Inc.), with undisclosed terms; CEO Jim O'Brien and the existing management team remained. A 2015 Denver Post profile reported 800+ employees and roughly $125M in annual revenue; third-party business-data profiles estimate 500–1,000 employees and $100–500M in revenue. Current financials are not publicly disclosed.

Operations. Skybeam/Rise is one of the largest independent fixed-wireless internet service providers in the U.S., offering residential and business broadband and digital voice (VoIP) service across roughly 16 states in the Midwest, Rockies, and Southwest, including Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, and Nevada. It uses licensed and unlicensed spectrum (including leased 2.5 GHz EBS and FCC microwave licenses) and has been expanding into fiber-to-the-home. Skybeam holds FCC Eligible Telecommunications Carrier designations and receives Rural Broadband Experiment universal-service support. It is an operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.

Litigation posture. Across the tracked data, Skybeam, LLC appears in exactly one case, solely as a defendant (0 as plaintiff, 1 as defendant) — consistent with an operating company defending against a patent assertion. The case is CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. Skybeam Acquisition Corp. et al., filed 2021-04-15 in the W.D. Tex. before Judge Albright, a venue favored by patent plaintiffs.

Context. CommWorks Solutions is a non-practicing entity and subsidiary of IP Investments Group LLC; it is characterized by Unified Patents and Stanford's NPE database as an NPE asserting acquired patents, including portfolios transferred from Intellectual Ventures. The same patent family (e.g. U.S. 6,832,249, covering multi-layer internet communication/QoS) was also asserted against Comcast, Mediacom, Cable One, Consolidated Communications, and Charter, and was subject to a Unified Patents ex parte reexamination. The caption names "Skybeam Acquisition Corp.," an affiliated Rise Broadband/JAB Wireless licensee entity.