Mountain Rural Telephone Cooperative (West Liberty, Ky.) has served a sparsely populated area of Appalachian Kentucky since 1950. Thanks in part to a $39.8 million grant and a loan of the same amount from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009, all customers have fiber broadband available to them at speeds up to 1 Gbps or higher.
Mountain Rural Telephone has a strong relationship with Licking Valley Rural Electric Cooperative, which operates in two of the five counties that the telco serves. That relationship has helped both companies to provide reliable, advanced services to their shared customer base.
Another important Smart Rural Community initiative for Mountain Rural Telephone was the construction of a 10 Gbps wide area network interconnecting six schools in the Morgan County School District, as well as a public safety answering point (PSAP). The network supports video surveillance and catastrophe analytics and enables alerts and video images to be shared with emergency responders via the PSAP. That PSAP is connected to two others and to a provider of hosted 911 capabilities via the Mountain Rural Telephone network, enabling the PSAPs to gain next-generation 911 capabilities without a major capital investment.
Mountain Telephone also provides fiber connectivity to The Gorge Underground, an abandoned and partially flooded limestone quarry that hosts kayak and boat tours into the flooded mine tunnels. The connectivity supports remote monitoring of video feeds and supports Wi-Fi access to patrons while on the tour.
In Means, Ky., Mountain Rural Telephone provides gigabit connectivity to Boneal Enterprise, a global, family owned manufacturer that is a major contractor for the United States Postal Service and the U.S. Air Force. Mountain Rural Telephone also provides hosted private branch exchange (HPBX) services to Boneal Enterprise, enabling Boneal employees in Means to communicate with employees at other company locations as if they were in the same building.
Mountain Rural Telephone hopes to attract work-from-home jobs to its serving area through a deal it is pitching to a company that matches home workers with clients that need tele-commuters. The ubiquitous availability of fiber broadband in the telco’s serving area should be attractive to employers, and the telco has offered to provide discounted 100 Mbps service to residents who successfully complete relevant training.
