Efforts underway by new owners to reorganize in the wake of ClearFiber
Trending
MORGANTOWN - The recent conversation amongst Westover city officials about the seemingly abandoned infrastructure left behind by troubled Internet service provider ClearFiber has led to some realizations about the now defunct company.
For starters, Westover officials were under the impression that the infrastructure, which includes dozens of junction boxes all over town, was no longer in use.
That is not the case. The service is still active. In fact, there are potentially hundreds of customers in the greater Morgantown area and beyond who have been receiving Internet service through ClearFiber, but have not been receiving a bill and have had nobody to contact.
That may be about to change.
"The company ClearFiber is being dissolved following the actions of Chad. We are changing the name and rolling it over to another company that's purchased his percentage of the business," Owen David told The Dominion Post.
Chad is Timothy Chad Henson, previously the company's majority owner. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay just over $1.4 million in restitution in March 2025 after pleading guilty to money laundering charges tied to a USDA grant program.
ClearFiber is a tradename used by DBI Networks LLC. According to the West Virginia Secretary of State's office, DBI Networks last filed an annual report in 2021 and had its business license terminated in December 2024 for failure to file.
Despite the issues faced by the company, the service was never terminated because the infrastructure used to deliver it had been state and federally funded.
Due to the attention placed on the issue in Westover, David said the company has been focusing its efforts on addressing customer needs there.
The goal, David said, is that eventually every ClearFiber customer will receive new hardware and begin paying for service again.
"They're not going to have to pay it back once we address the situation and change it," he said of any service received in the meantime. “We'll reach out to them and go into their residence and change out their modems when we roll into the new company."
"And we're not trying to price gouge. We're not looking to raise anything. The one thing ClearFiber had that most companies don't is the no-contract service," David said. "We want to maintain what the business model was. Just with much better communication and service."
All told, David said ClearFiber had about 700 customers in the greater Morgantown area and parts of Pennsylvania.
Asked who customers should contact, he provided a link to RC Communications LLC at rccommunicationsllc.com.
As for the city of Westover, officials indicated they believe there is a good faith effort being made to reform the company and address their original infrastructure questions.
"They would need a new franchise agreement, obviously. But if this falls through and doesn't happen, then we're where we were before," Public Works Director Jason Stinespring said. "But if they get the service up and running and everything gets fixed, then that's the ideal situation."
Attorney Tim Stranko agreed.
"If it falls through, we still have the franchise agreement in place now, in which abandoned property is surrendered to us. So, we certainly have that option. I would say another option would be that we could take an action to force them to clean it up," he said. "We have any number of options here. We figure the best option is for them to fix their own stuff and get it back running."