Unspoken Words Blankets Sausalito and California Wine Country with Helium

When most people think of the Northern California tech scene, glassy sprawling campuses and venture capitalists come to mind. But long before all that, Unspoken Words was helping small businesses get online and thrive.

The company started out in 1989, supporting local research firms, small corporate offices and neighborhood entrepreneurs. Over the years, founder Steven Ulrich built a reputation for solving connectivity problems for rural and coastal communities, which were frequently overlooked by larger ISPs.

“We’ve been connecting people for decades,” Ulrich said. “It’s just what we do.”

Necessity: The mother of connection

In the early 2000s, Ulrich received a personal request that would change the course of his business. A close friend was dying from melanoma, and wanted to spend his final days on his boat in Sausalito. To help him stay in touch with his family, Ulrich rigged a wireless link to the marina, creating the town’s first waterfront network.

Word spread quickly, and before long, boat owners, restaurants, and shops up and down the harbor were requesting service.

A few years later, Ulrich brought that same ingenuity to the Anderson Valley winemaking district and found a new opportunity with local vineyards, bringing them online and enhancing their overall connectivity. A few connections grew into a small, private network that now supports dozens of wineries and businesses across the region. By 2018, Unspoken Words had built multiple fiber circuits into Anderson Valley to meet rising demand. When the pandemic hit two years later, that network was essential.

Today, the company manages seven fiber links across dozens of sites in Northern California and continues to expand its footprint. Residents and businesses in those communities depend on the redundancy that only a dedicated network can provide.

The Helium Opportunity

In September this year, Unspoken Words upgraded its networks with Helium Plus in Sausalito and Anderson Valley, initially as an experiment.

“I just wanted to get a little more revenue out of these,” Ulrich said with a laugh.

The results were fast. Rather than installing new hardware, Unspoken Words layered Helium Plus onto its existing 121 third-party Wi-Fi access points (66 in Anderson Valley, 55 in Sausalito). According to data on Helium World, the Sausalito network alone serves 2,300 users a day.

Integration was seamless: Using Helium Plus and the network’s existing Ubiquiti infrastructure, it was easy to extend coverage without replacing or rebuilding anything.

“We had no idea what we were getting into, but the usage spoke for itself,” Ulrich said.

For Ulrich, Helium’s value is simple: it works.

The Network provides an additional layer of connectivity that complements fiber and satellite links. Having an extra redundancy layer combined with measurable usage and easy integration turned Ulrich from a cautious experimenter into a firm believer.

Expanding Possibilities, Looking Ahead

Ulrich plans to explore more use cases for the Helium Network. In Anderson Valley, he’s looking at smart vineyard applications like tracking grape bins, tractors, and temperature sensors. In Sausalito, he’s in talks with the city about upgrading its aging parking meters, which currently run on legacy cellular connections. Replacing those systems with Helium SIMs could make them more efficient and easier to maintain.

“Helium opens up possibilities we couldn’t touch before, whether that’s tracking assets across farmland or solving connectivity problems for a city block.”

Unspoken Words is even looking for opportunities beyond California. The company now supports a French winery group with two dozen vineyards across six countries, managing all their North American facilities. Helium will soon be helping with that part of their broader portfolio.

For Ulrich, people-powered connectivity is just the next logical step in a long history of solving real-world network problems.

“Helium gives us a new way to do what we’ve done for the last 35 years,” Ulrich said. “Connecting people, wherever they are.”

Ready to onboard with Helium? Reach out to business@nova-labs.com to learn more.