Preston Rhea

Principal

Preston Rhea brings fifteen years of experience in telecommunications and public interest advocacy to HR&A. 

Preston’s work builds infrastructure with public purpose at the intersection of community-based governance and market realities. He advises public sector clients including states, cities, counties, and other authorities to build infrastructure that realizes access and adoption goals, reduces barriers to deployment of last-mile networks, supports next-generation smart cities applications, and unlocks opportunities for interconnection with public assets. 

Preston helped the California Department of Technology’s Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative Team (MMBI) to build its capacity to plan and deliver the statewide middle-mile broadband network – the single largest public broadband investment in the country. He has continued to support MMBI through establishing relationships with potential customers and local government stakeholders who will make use of the network once operations begin. 

Other notable projects include developing an assets and infrastructure strategy to activate and sustain the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting’s conduit and dark fiber network; working with the County of Los Angeles Internal Services Department to build a community broadband program that is making major interventions for broadband competition and affordability in the country’s largest County; and building a regional coalition of more than two dozen San Francisco Bay Area government agencies, community anchor institutions, and nonprofits to unite the region’s digital equity ecosystems. Preston has served as a subject matter expert on numerous other projects at HR&A including program designs for broadband in affordable housing, engagements with utilities for broadband deployments in the State of New York, and coordinating workforce and economic development stakeholder convenings for the State of Texas’ Digital Opportunity Plan. 

Prior to joining HR&A, Preston spent six years at Monkeybrains, an Internet Service Provider based in San Francisco. As Director of Engineering, Policy Program, Preston coordinated partnerships with governments to build public fiber to affordable housing, broke barriers to affordable internet in large apartment buildings, and advanced gigabit network penetration in underserved areas. Preston developed the public policy program while managing the technician team at Monkeybrains. 

Prior to joining Monkeybrains in 2015, Preston worked at Code for America developing civic engagement practices with city governments and networks of civic technologists, developed and implemented a field curriculum for community wireless network deployment at New America’s Open Technology Institute in Washington, DC, and worked at a content delivery network startup in Beijing, China. 

Preston holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.