Rural Broadband Solutions for Cooperatives

Broadband Connectivity Challenges for Southeast Cooperatives

COVID-19 changed how the world lives and works and highlighted the need to close the digital divide.  Electric and telephone cooperatives understand that providing their rural communities with access to fast, reliable broadband is critical.  Without high-speed Internet access that opens doors to the digital world, underserved communities will struggle to thrive.

Rural areas need vital services like videoconferencing, tele-health, and distance education.  Only a high-quality, high-speed communications network that connects your communities to a wide variety of new digital services can eliminate the barriers that keep them from having equal opportunities as their big city counterparts. 

For cooperatives, building a network to provide rural broadband service and other add-on services to member businesses and residents in your area is a big job.  However, building the local network is only the first step. Cooperatives then need to connect their communities to the world. The scarcity of local network providers in rural areas means that you may need to connect your network to carriers in a major market like Atlanta.  Not only does this option increase latency and the risk for outages, but it also adds unnecessary staffing and costs to your solution. 

Even if national carriers can deliver the bandwidth that you need, it’s hard to know how reliable their fiber networks are without full visibility into their fiber routes.  You need to be assured that your network will be up and running in a split second in case of a failure.