Tacoma's telecom market is in transition
Tacoma is in an unusual telecom moment. For years the city had something most others didn't: Click! Network, the municipal broadband service operated by Tacoma Public Utilities. Click! was a genuinely competitive alternative to Comcast for business customers in the Tacoma service area, and it kept pricing honest in ways other Puget Sound cities envied. In 2020, after lengthy public debate, TPU announced a transition arrangement under which Rainier Connect took over operations of the Click! network. That transition and the reshuffling that followed have changed the competitive dynamics for business customers in the Tacoma service area. On top of that, Tacoma has the Port of Tacoma (the second-busiest container port in the Pacific Northwest after Seattle), Joint Base Lewis-McChord on the southern edge of the metro, a growing healthcare sector led by MultiCare and CHI Franciscan (now Virginia Mason Franciscan Health), and a meaningful logistics and distribution base. All of those sectors need specific, well-managed network infrastructure, and this is a moment when the right carrier advice actually changes outcomes. ITG has been working the Tacoma market since the company was founded. We've watched the Click! transition play out in real time and we know what it means for a business customer trying to figure out what to do next.
The carrier landscape in Tacoma
Tacoma's current carrier picture includes Rainier Connect (now operating the former Click! Network footprint — a meaningful fiber and cable footprint across Tacoma), Comcast Business (dominant cable business provider across Pierce County), Ziply Fiber, Lumen / CenturyLink, Astound Business (formerly Wave), and Zayo for dedicated transport. The Port of Tacoma and downtown core have reasonably good carrier diversity; the industrial tideflats and outlying Pierce County areas are thinner. The Click!-to-Rainier transition has been a real thing for many Tacoma businesses — not always bad, but it has created uncertainty, pricing changes, and in some cases contract issues that need sorting out. We've helped multiple clients work through what the transition means for their specific service and, in a few cases, helped them move cleanly to a different carrier when that turned out to be the right move. For enterprise applications and cloud connectivity, Tacoma is close enough to Seattle's carrier-dense facilities that most businesses can get competitive options with reasonable latency. For anything requiring genuine metro-level fiber density downtown, the market is workable but requires knowing which buildings are lit by whom.
Tacoma industries we work with
Tacoma's economy reflects its geography and history: the Port of Tacoma drives a substantial logistics, warehousing, and distribution sector (including cold storage, 3PL operators, and heavy manufacturing tied to the port), healthcare is one of the largest employer categories (MultiCare Health System and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health both operate major facilities across the metro), military and defense contractors supporting Joint Base Lewis-McChord represent a meaningful share of the business base, higher education has a presence (University of Washington Tacoma, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma Community College), and the craft manufacturing, food and beverage, and arts sectors have grown substantially in recent years. Each has different telecom requirements and we adapt accordingly.
Where Tacoma businesses tend to overpay
- Click! to Rainier transition hangovers. Some businesses are still on contracts that don't quite match the current service, with pricing that reflects the old municipal structure.
- Comcast Business legacy bundles. Small and mid-sized Tacoma businesses often stayed on Comcast through the Click! era and are now on pricing that's no longer competitive.
- Port-adjacent logistics with brittle carrier paths. A single cut in the wrong conduit can take out an entire distribution operation — and we see facilities where the redundancy has never been actually tested.
- Healthcare systems with site-by-site carrier sprawl. Multi-facility health systems in Pierce County often grew by acquisition and have mismatched carriers at different locations.
- POTS line tails on security and life-safety systems. Still present at many Tacoma facilities, often with monthly costs much higher than the business realizes.
Case Study · Port of Tacoma Logistics Client
Logistics and distribution operator with three Pierce County facilities including two near the Port of Tacoma and one in Lakewood. Existing setup was a mix of legacy Click! circuits (now in Rainier transition), Comcast Business at the Lakewood site, an on-prem PBX with a service contract but no modernization plan, and SIP trunks billed from a third provider nobody could remember setting up. ITG audited the full stack, designed a cohesive SD-WAN overlay using two carriers with actual physical path diversity, migrated the voice to a UCaaS platform, and killed the orphaned SIP trunks. Net monthly savings were about 27%, plus a substantially more resilient network for port-adjacent operations where minutes of downtime have real cost.
Questions we hear from Tacoma businesses
What actually happened with Click! Network?
Tacoma Public Utilities owned and operated the Click! Network for years as a municipal broadband service. After extensive public debate, TPU entered an arrangement under which Rainier Connect took over operations of the Click! footprint. The transition is largely complete but the effects on business contracts and pricing are still playing out. If you were a Click! business customer, it's worth having someone review what you're now on.
Is Rainier Connect a good option for Tacoma businesses?
In most Tacoma addresses where they have service, yes — Rainier inherited a capable fiber and cable footprint and has generally been credible on business service. We still evaluate all available carriers at each address because the right answer varies.
Do you work with Port of Tacoma tenants and logistics operators?
Yes. Port-adjacent businesses have specific connectivity requirements around uptime and physical diversity that don't always get enough attention during procurement, and we've built networks designed specifically for those needs.
Can you support JBLM contractors or defense-adjacent businesses?
For commercial and unclassified work, yes — we regularly support professional services firms and contractors whose work touches the JBLM ecosystem. We don't provide classified or cleared services, but commercial telecom advisory for companies in that sector is squarely in our scope.
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