Our Story
A local internet company, started by a local, for the people the big providers forgot.
Built here, run by people who live here
Nimbus Solutions started in 2017 with one person, one tower, and a simple idea: the Four Corners deserves internet as good as anywhere else, delivered by someone who actually lives here.
Founder Michael Halls was born in Durango, with family roots that run deep around Mancos. After earning a degree in Computer Information Systems and Security, picking up his Cisco network certification, and spending around fifteen years in the internet business (much of it at Brainstorm Internet in Durango), he set out to build the kind of provider this region had been missing.
How it actually started
When Michael left Brainstorm he spent about a year contracting, until the work dried up. Then in 2017 a former Brainstorm customer called: Deer Hill Expeditions, out on Road 41 in Mancos. Service had gone downhill after he left, and they wanted to work with him directly.
The fix was a point to point link that ran from the Mancos brewery, through town, across his great uncle Harry Halls’s ranch, and out to Deer Hill. By the time it was finished, Michael had figured something out. Put a few transmitters up on Menifee Mountain, and he could reach a hundred homes. That was the start of Nimbus.
One canyon at a time
What began as “a one man show” grew the hard way, by climbing it. In 2019 Michael built a solar powered repeater on a steep hill owned by David Temple, a spot the network still calls Temple Hill, and brought service to its first 40 customers. Over the next two years, two more repeat sites snaked down the canyon as coverage spread.
McElmo Canyon is the kind of place a wireless company is made for, a deep canyon on the edge of nothing that no one else was ever going to serve. With the cooperation of landowners like Chris Jeter, Nimbus stood up solar sites that now deliver 100 Mbps LTE to homes, plus commercial grade connectivity to industrial operations like Messer and Airgas and to Battle Rock Charter School. As Michael says, “It will never have service if I don’t do it.”
That same year the crew went looking for a way into Elk Stream and Elk Springs Ranch, a community tucked so far into the mountains that every other ISP had missed it. They climbed rooftops and hiked hills until they found two spots to broadcast from. The canyon was too deep for solar, so this network ran on unlicensed 5 GHz. The first repeater burned in a summer fire later that year. Farther south they built Whisker Ridge on land owned by the Boones, hauling solar panels up game trails on their backs to bring it to life.
Chasing ghosts in Webber Canyon
The part of the network closest to Michael’s heart is Webber Canyon, where his grandparents were born in the 1920s. His great uncle Harry’s barn, now owned by his cousin Suzie, was the very first Nimbus tower site. The crew dragged WiFi to the end of the road and later upgraded it to LTE using tower sites a previous provider had abandoned.
Truth be told, that previous provider was Michael. He had built the Webber Canyon network for Brainstorm back in 2008, and after he left it fell into disrepair. Brainstorm, acquired several times over the years, walked away and let it rot. So he knocked on the doors of tower hosts who hadn’t seen him in fifteen years, rekindled the old relationships, and brought the network back to life. “Every time I go into Webber,” he says, “I feel like I’m chasing ghosts.”
The same story played out on the other side of Mancos Hill, in Hesperus, Breen, Kline, Marvel, and Red Mesa, the country where Michael grew up and where his cousins, aunts, and uncles still live. He had built that network for Brainstorm too, and it had been abandoned the same way. He revisited the same tower hosts, re-established the contracts, tore out the trash, and brought a network of roughly 50 people back to life. It is big, flat, open country, ideal for wireless, and the LTE performance there is second to none.
Still growing, still local
Today Nimbus serves well over a thousand homes and businesses across Southwest Colorado, supported by a small local crew who climb the towers, run the cable, and answer the phone. It has grown almost entirely by word of mouth, neighbors telling neighbors, without a dollar of paid advertising. In 2025, Nimbus acquired ZumaCom, a Dolores-based provider founded by Erich and Erica Hennig, deepening our roots and coverage in the Dolores Valley.
Rooted in this place
We’re not headquartered in another state. The people who plan the towers and answer the phone live here too, raising families and shopping at the same stores as the customers they serve.
Self-funded and locally controlled
Nimbus is self-funded. We answer to our customers and our community, not to investors or a corporate parent in another state. We’re small enough that we don’t even qualify for the federal grants the big fiber companies build on, so we grow the network out of our own pocket and within our means. That keeps our priorities simple: take care of the people already on the network first.
Our crew is local through and through, with team members whose families go back generations in Cortez and Dolores. The whole network is engineered, built, and maintained right here. If you want the technical details, our network page has the full story.
Why we do it
We’re not chasing contracts or quarterly numbers. We sponsor local events, keep free public WiFi running in Mancos, and connect schools, water districts, and families that the big providers wrote off. As Michael puts it: “That’s why I do this. Not for the contracts. For the schools, the families, and the community.”
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Tell us where you need service and a local team member will reach out to confirm coverage and walk you through next steps. No contracts, no pressure.