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.

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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.