Managed WiFi Provider Dojo Networks Keeps Strong State College Roots While Growing Locally and Nationally

For managed WiFi provider Dojo Networks, its State College roots have been foundational to building trust and reliability with the property owners, managers and residents it serves.

The company’s building has changed more than once over the years, and it has grown to connect multi-family residential properties in nearly three dozen states, but its home base has remained the same. Today its team keeps more than 70 properties across the State College area connected, with local support and resources.

Dojo Networks recently expanded its footprint even further in the Centre Region by deploying its managed WiFi+ service across eight State College communities at once: the five properties in the State College Collective portfolio — Farmstead, Oakwood, Northbrook, Aaron 1 and Aaron 2 — along with The Rise, The Brexx and The Pointe.

Together, those eight properties account for 1,084 apartment homes across 159 buildings, ranging from a single 12-story tower at The Rise to 82 low-rise buildings spread across The Brexx. Each of those units, and every shared amenity space, has gigabit WiFi live the day a resident moves in, with no installation appointment, no router to buy and no separate account to open with an outside provider.

That rollout happened because Dojo Networks built its own fiber network across State College, rather than reselling another company’s, and that infrastructure now supports dozens of properties in the area.

“Fall move-in is the hardest week of the year for a property’s internet, and it’s the week residents form their opinion of it,” Dan Myers, CEO of Dojo Networks, said of the recent rollout. “Getting these communities turned up means a resident carrying boxes up the stairs is online before the boxes are unpacked, and the onsite teams can spend the day on residents instead of on WiFi passwords.”

Myers says that’s the result of his company treating State College not like a market but its home.

(Dan Myers is owner of StateCollege.com.)

Born From a Basement, a ‘Bulletin Board,’ and a Spare Bedroom

Myers was building things years before Dojo Networks entered the picture. In 1981, working out of the basement of the townhome where he lived in the Philadelphia suburb of Downingtown, he built his first electronic bulletin board system, an early text-based online community, at a time when most households did not own a computer at all. It even had e-commerce capability that he designed and built a decade before Amazon was founded.

He went to Penn State in 1984 when he might have had the one and only PC in a dorm room where he could dial-up the internet and connect to Penn State’s network. He stayed through 1990, earning his degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

Then he did something a lot of graduates only talk about: he built a business out of nothing but a spare bedroom. In 1992, Myers started that business from his own home, first taking over one bedroom, then two, meeting clients in the living room because there was nowhere else to meet them.

In those early years, the work was video production, CD-ROM creation and web design. By 1994, the business had outgrown the house, and Myers moved it into its first real office: a roughly 900-square-foot suite at 220 Regent Court, near Boalsburg.

By 1995 and 1996, the business had evolved again into dial-up internet access for other businesses, T1 lines and ISDN circuits, the unglamorous plumbing of the early commercial internet in central Pennsylvania. In 1998, Myers pioneered fixed wireless broadband and becoming one of the first five WISPs —wireless internet service providers — in the world, beaming bandwidth from rooftop to rooftop and tower to client.

That experimentation turned into a business model built specifically for multifamily housing. Myers connected his first multifamily property to the internet himself, and Dojo Networks, in the form the industry would come to know, was born in State College. Not in Silicon Valley or a boardroom of investors, but in a college town, solving a college town problem: how do you get reliable internet into buildings full of residents who all showed up on the same move-in weekend and all expect it to work immediately?

That’s why the company’s origin and perspective matter, Myers said.

“A national telecom company can sell you a contract,” he said. “It cannot tell you what August 20th looks like on a property with 400 leases turning over in 72 hours.”

26 Years Later, Dojo Networks Has Grown, but State College Is Still Home

Its offices have changed, but Dojo Networks never left State College. Since Myers started it in that spare bedroom, the company moved first into the small suite on Regent Court, then, in 2024, into its current headquarters at 2929 Stewart Drive.

That most recent move was not about wanting a nicer lobby. By then, Dojo Networks was running infrastructure in 33 states, and it had outgrown the kind of office space a small local company needs. It needed the kind of space a national infrastructure company needs: more warehouse than boardroom.

The company’s chief technology officer, Michael Caldwell, is a Penn State graduate himself, and before he was engineering network infrastructure for tens of thousands of residential units, he was a Linux clustering engineer and systems administrator supporting Penn State research computing teams.

With Myers, he’s part of a leadership team that didn’t read about the multifamily and student housing world in a market report. It lived inside it, in the same neighborhoods as its earliest clients. 

And while State College stayed home, the reach did not. What began with a single connected property in State College now spans 33 states and more than 50,000 residential units, growing into markets one property, one referral and one renewed contract at a time.

The team grew as the footprint did. In 2020, Dojo Networks connected its first properties outside of Pennsylvania and started operating as a national company instead of a regional one.

In 2019, it had five people working out of the State College office. Today it has 37, scattered from Seattle to Miami, almost all of them working from home instead of a shared floor. The roster spread out across the country and the company got bigger, but its home is still located in State College.

Notably amid that growth, Dojo Networks reports it has 100% customer retention, meaning every client who has signed with Dojo Networks has stayed with the company as its internet provider.

Dojo Networks has grown to a 33-state footprint without taking outside investment, meaning no private equity firm pushing for a faster exit and no venture board demanding growth at the expense of service quality. The company is also SOC 2 Type II certified, a mark that the security practices protecting resident data have been independently audited and verified.

In 2025, Dojo Networks debuted on the Inc. 5000 list, a ranking of America’s fastest-growing private companies, coming in at No. 2408. In 2026, it showed up again, climbing to No. 2137, backed by three-year revenue growth of 54%.

“This continued recognition reflects our team’s unwavering dedication to our clients and our ongoing commitment to innovating in the managed WiFi space,” Myers said.

A quarter-century after Dojo Networks started, Myers says staying true to its roots is what has helped it grow, scaling out a foundation that understood State College properties and their residents’ connectivity needs.