Cal.net Leadership

Ken Garnett is the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and a Board Director for Cal.net, a major telecommunications service provider in the Sacramento, California area providing primarily fixed-wireless high-speed Internet and voice services to heretofore un-served rural California locales.

Over the course of the past 35 years, Ken has leveraged his passion for innovation, his focus on excellence and his diverse skills in executive management, product management, technology marketing, embedded systems design, and software development to engender significant results at numerous start-up companies. He has been involved in industries comprising Internet telecommunications, mobile multimedia and streaming video products, computer graphics workstations, mechanical computer-aided design software, and geophysical oil exploration. Although having worked primarily at Silicon Valley based companies prior to Cal.net, Ken started his career at two Denver and Boulder, Colorado area start-ups.

At Cal.net, Ken envisioned, launched and grew the broadband services platform, and continues to set the technical and strategic company path. Ken has also been instrumental in raising significant growth capital for the company from both commercial institutions and government entities. From the latter sources, his direct efforts resulted in grant awards and subsidies totaling nearly $60 million from state and federal agencies.

From a leading-edge technology perspective, in 2013 Ken led Cal.net to become the first operator in the country to roll out a commercially-feasible large-scale trial of TV White Space broadband technology. And in 2018, he launched the deployment of small-cell fixed-wireless LTE infrastructure designed for use in the CBRS (“Citizens Broadband Radio Service”) 3.5-GHz band. Both these technologies will be key to enabling not only the delivery of high speed Internet to previously unserved rural California communities, but other functionality as well.