Tech Trailblazer
Full Circle
GFiber’s Keib Turns Theory into Practice
By Sara Winegardner
It all began with a college essay.
While in graduate school at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, GFiber Chief Product & Technology Officer John Keib wrote his thesis on emerging competition between direct broadcast satellite and hybrid fiber coax. He leveraged that to earn a position at Thompson Multimedia in 1994, eventually rising through the ranks of DirecTV and Time Warner Cable before arriving at GFiber.
He intentionally took on leadership roles along the way that allowed him to touch not only technology, but also marketing, sales, customer service and operations. And while he’s been a part of several major industry developments throughout his storied career, Keib finds the current moment to be one of the most exciting he’s ever been involved with.
“The coolest one is the one we’re working on now, which is how to reinvent a broadband experience for customers in a way that is much different than the rest of what I consider to be a tired and over-penetrated industry,” he says.
Welcoming as many voices to the table has been key to Keib’s success over the years, and a desire to build deeper conversations with the vendor community saw him establish GFiber Labs, the company’s first in-house R&D initiative. It ultimately came from a need to introduce vendors to the benefits of the GFiber network and to create a live testing environment. GFiber teamed up with Nokia in June to complete a network slicing demo and more is planned later this year before rolling the capability out to customers. GFiber now also has a Trusted Tester pool of customers that is growing monthly, and it has been able to trial 50G speeds on live networks in Kansas City, among other achievements.
“This is one of the most scrappy initiatives that we’ve done. It is not a lot of overhead, and it really is weaponized in a way to make the customer experience better,” he says.
Keib is the first to hold his title at GFiber, and while technology development is one of his core focuses, he believes those advancements can’t be developed in a silo. Instead, he believes it is time to build a culture that fully focuses on doing the right thing for customers, using all of his previous experiences to do so.
“The timing is somewhat perfect because all the things that are cutting edge and coming forward on the AI front are really about understanding all those levers that need to be pushed,” Keib says. “It’s really deciphering what is the long-term ROI for these services, not so much just from a financial payback, but for the advent of what we can do better for customers in that full circle view, and then also introduce new products and services over the next decade or so that customers haven’t seen before.”
Conversations around AI surround Keib and his teams, and he finds one of the greatest challenges with meeting this moment is the pace of the technology and the potential to miss out on opportunities if you’re not thinking years ahead. Keib encourages everyone, regardless of industry, to be aware of how they’re engaging with AI and to embrace the idea that they may not be trained properly on how to think for those platforms.
“I think you need to be ready to completely retrain your brain for how you think,” he says. “Start thinking of things that you actually have never thought of, and spend more time brainstorming and thinking outside the box. Actually beg anybody for input who is not always neck deep in your industry.”
Fast Fax
- Keib received his B.S. in Human Ecology from Cornell University in 1991 and was a member of the university’s wrestling team.
- GFiber structures and markets its plans based on a consumer’s lifestyle, and its $70/month 1 Gig plan has been the same price since 2012.
- Passionate about giving back, Keib has been a member of or held leadership positions with the ARC Foundation, the Metro Development Board, the Ronald McDonald House and the California State Chamber Board.