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Floyd County phone cooperative is center of attention
Virginia Business
April
2005
Chalk it up as a win for the little
guy. For decades telephone cooperatives that served
rural areas were largely ignored by bigger telecom providers,
who didn’t think the relatively few customers
there were worth the trouble. But now the tiny Citizens
Telephone Cooperative in Floyd County southwest of Roanoke
finds itself very much in demand.
The newly planned Regional Broadband
Initiative, backed in part by money from the state’s
Tobacco Commission, is a $12 million fiber network that
will cover 20 counties across Virginia’s southern
boundary. Planners of the broadband system want to use
Citizens’ existing fiber network to connect it
to fiber-optic networks outside the region. “We’re
kind of sitting right in the middle of all these things,
and we have quite a bit of fiber already,” says
Gerald Gallimore, Citizens’ general manager. “It
won’t take too much construction to tie it all
together.”
Tad Deriso, general manager of the Mid-Atlantic Broadband
Cooperative, which is overseeing the new network, calls
Citizens’ network the “proverbial golden
spike in the railroad. It’s going to further solidify
what everybody’s doing and make it a really exciting
project.”
To the west is the planned LENOWISCO Rural Area Network,
a fiber system for Lee, Wise and Scott counties and
the city of Norton. Gallimore says a link to the seven-county
Coalfield Coalition region in the state’s southwest
tip is also being studied. “That gets you from
mountain to coast, all the way across the state,”
he says.
A key reason Citizens can play this role is that it’s
been investing in its network. Last year it bought cable
television franchises in Floyd, Wythe and Craig counties
in Southwest Virginia from Time Warner and has been
upgrading its network there. The cooperative already
provides voice, video and broadband data service to
its five-county region, which includes Wythe, Carroll,
Floyd and Patrick counties and part of Montgomery County.
Preliminary design work to figure out how to link the
networks should be complete this spring. The new regional
broadband network should be up by next year.
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