Electric Co-Ops, Rural Providers Stress Partnerships Amid Federal Broadband Investments

Rural broadband providers and electric cooperatives stressed the need Tuesday for more partnerships with communities and industry for broadband deployment. It’s “time to think creatively” about how to “get the job done” given recent federal broadband investments, said NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield during a webinar.

Some rural areas served by larger providers “tend to have been a little bit left behind when it does come to innovation” and having “robust broadband,” Bloomfield said. “We now are seeing so many innovative partnerships cropping up across the country," she said, noting some are being established with entities as far as 200 miles apart. “We can leave no communities behind” because “we are on the cusp of the largest distribution of federal funding for broadband infrastructure and deployment,” she said.

Electric cooperatives “bring a lot of creativity to new ways” of solving the digital divide, said National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jeffrey Connor. “No one succeeds building out a broadband project alone and it's partnerships that make these types of efforts worthwhile,” Connor said. There’s “a lot of stuff that goes into … bringing about a new ISP” and it was “pretty intimidating for our staff,” said Appalachian Electric Cooperative Director-Fiber Services Blake McNew. The company’s Trilight Fiber partnered with Foresight Communications to build out broadband services in Tennessee.

“Our partnership is based on the success of one is the success of the other,” McNew said, and “we couldn’t be happier.” Appalachian receives a monthly payment for each mile of fiber made available to Foresight and is paid on a per-customer connection as part of the partnership, he said. The intent is so “we don't just go out there and build miles indiscriminately to get the revenue for that,” he said. McNew noted the company also has 50,000-100,000 workers through contracting and subcontracting to focus on building and maintaining networks in the event of an emergency. “You may be on the lucky side given on some of these workforce shortages,” Bloomfield said.

Developing partnerships with communications union districts (CUDs) in Vermont required “a lot of relationship building” and education on projects that would provide access to “fast, affordable, reliable broadband,” said Kurt Gruendling, Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom (WCVT) vice president-marketing and business development. It’s “about a $700 billion problem here in Vermont to get ... the under- and unserved connected,” Gruendling said, and “what we brought to the table was the expertise.”

One challenge in the beginning was forecasting whether any given network will have enough customers to have full-time technicians working in that area, Gruendling said. “We’re a little bit in flux working through that,” he said, but “we have some relationships with after-hours emergency restoration folks” to mitigate that. Another challenge is managing the pace of incoming projects and ensuring enough resources are available, he said: That requires “relying more on unique partnerships like our partnership” with the National Rural Telecommunications Partnership and other contractors.

NRTC and WCVT joined to do early feasibility studies to “understand what the cost and opportunity was” for broadband deployment throughout Vermont, said NRTC Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Greg Santoro. Deploying fiber “was going to be challenging to do through the bond markets” and recent grant funding has “pushed [CUD’s] to move forward,” Santoro said.