High-Speed Anniversary

Five years ago, the world began shutting down just as United Cooperative Services began fulfilling its promise to provide members with high-speed internet service.

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Just two months later, United flipped the switch on May 18 to supply the first beta group of members with internet to test out the new service.

Eric Cagle, United’s network operations manager, said he looks back on the early days of providing high-speed internet service with nostalgia and a little bit of relief that the long hours of those first few months have ended. The pandemic made launching the project much more difficult than expected.

“The plan was to work closely with people from our project design partner, National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC), but because of the pandemic, they weren’t allowed to travel to help us,” Cagle said. “So, we were it.”

Jamila Jimison and her family became one of the first 100 beta testers to receive internet service from United. The family initially had DSL internet or internet using existing phone lines, a much slower version of the internet compared to United’s fiber network. Jamila said the DSL had become unreliable and unpredictable.

As the owner of NFaith, a home-based medical billing service, Jimison said she couldn’t afford to have unreliable service.

“Before United, we had a lot of internet issues with our other provider,” she said. “We went without service for weeks. I would have to go to Starbucks and work, or wherever they had Wi-Fi.”

Addressing a Need

United CEO Cameron Smallwood knew that United members needed reliable internet service because so many had requested the co-op to provide internet for years.

“A big part of my job is listening to the membership and paying attention to their needs,” Smallwood said. “We heard the requests, did our research and knew that we were positioned well to provide this service to our membership.”

When United first started to explore the possibility of providing internet service to its members, the cooperative conducted a feasibility study with NRTC. The study found that 87 percent of United members lacked reliable and affordable high-speed internet.

In September 2019, United’s board of directors unanimously elected to move forward with providing high-speed broadband internet service to members. In June and July of that year, the cooperative’s membership had overwhelmingly voted to move forward with providing internet. Ninety-one percent responded positively to the proposition.

United’s initial five-year plan to provide the internet to its membership involved constructing wireless monopoles to serve more remote areas. Areas in the east would get fiber to the home (FTTH) while farther to the west and in more remote areas, the wireless towers would provide service. Initial tests proved wireless service failed to provide a high-quality experience.

Though it would delay the project’s completion, United scrapped the idea because of geography and quality of service issues and opted instead to offer FTTH in all areas, said John Taylor, United’s network planning manager.

“Our original network design planned for the placement of 225 fixed wireless towers,” he said. “We were going to serve a lot of our membership off those towers, but because of the poor performance and the challenges of the geography, we decided that it wasn’t cost-effective, nor would it provide good service to our members.”

Supply Chain Challenges

COVID-19 caused delays and headaches for United’s planning and procurement department. Items previously available in a matter of days took weeks and months to acquire, said Robert Sherman, senior manager of procurement and facilities at United.

“Once we saw that the supply chain was going to get out of hand, we jumped on orders and stockpiled a little bit ahead of the longer lead times,” Sherman said. “That allowed us to ride our stock through the times where lead times were way out.”

Along with longer lead times, Sherman and United had to learn a whole new set of materials for the fiber build-out as well as continue to source electric utility supplies, which would also become difficult to purchase.

“The main thing that changed was we had to learn a new supply chain, new materials and new products,” Sherman said.

Milestones

United had connected 10,000 subscribers in less than two short years of providing the first 100 subscribers with internet, despite the complications of a worldwide pandemic. In the ensuing years, the cooperative would complete its backbone of fiber to better serve members’ needs and sign up almost 20,000 additional internet subscribers.

Scotty Fogarty and his growing family became the 10,000th subscribers to United’s internet service. Fogarty, a firefighter with the Dallas Fire Department, said his satellite internet suffered from reliability issues. Nowadays, his family has all the internet they need.

The Godley couple had three children with a fourth on the way in 2022. Now, their four children have gadgets perpetually connected to the internet to watch movies and TV or play games.

“I’m not an internet guru, but I guess we have the bandwidth to support a family of six,” Fogarty said. “We don’t notice any slowdowns when all four kids are on devices and I’m working on the computer. United’s service is just as reliable, just as fast as when we first got it.”

In February of 2024, United completed a significant milestone by completing what it refers to as the “eight rings,” or backbone, of its fiber network. The backbone is comprised of a redundant fiber network that transports traffic from the member’s home, through United’s network, and then out to hubs in Dallas, which then connect United’s network to the internet.

Clay Turner, outside plant manager for United, remembers the early days before the rings’ completion. In the past five years, he said he’s seen the rapid and unprecedented growth of United’s network.

“I can’t stress enough the number of folks that we have activated, the number of miles we have built, the equipment changes we’ve made, the redundancies we’ve put in place in the time frame we have, is just almost unbelievable,” Turner said. “It was definitely a team effort, and it took everyone buying in both internally and externally to be where we are today.”

At almost the same time that United finished its backbone of fiber, Bobby Waddell’s family garnered the 25,000th spot in United’s subscriber count.

Waddell said that COVID-19 posed a serious challenge to the family’s previous internet provider, which couldn’t keep up with the demands of a busy family.

“With better internet, I get faster emails and faster downloads of big files that people send me,” Waddell said. “Before it would spin and spin, and now it’s just a matter of fractions of a second and I’m able to download, view a file and send it back.”

Addressing the Future, Celebrating the Past

What started as 100 initial internet subscribers in 2020 has become a network of nearly 30,000 subscribers.

In the next five years, the internet landscape is expected to evolve rapidly and change, said Chris MacIntyre, United’s vice president of internet services.

MacIntyre said the internet business has shown tremendous growth, eclipsing initial projections. He said he believes the future will certainly be interesting and that United is well-positioned for success.

“The majority of the fiber network is planned to be complete in 2027,” he said. “All core network equipment in place is highly scalable. The network itself is currently being upgraded to more than double its current capacity. This forethought is what distinguishes United and precisely demonstrates our commitment to putting our members first and preparing them for the future of the internet.”

Jamila Jimison said the demands of running a small business haven’t changed in the last five years. If anything, since her business has grown significantly, she said she needs reliable, high-speed internet more than ever.

“Poor internet service was limiting my productivity and opportunities,” Jimison said. “United’s internet has been extremely important and necessary to run my business.”

For Jimison and her family, she said United’s high-speed internet came at just the right time.

Smallwood said that United always kept families like the Jimisons in mind when planning, designing and executing United’s reliable network of high-speed fiber internet.

“The tremendous growth of our network is the culmination of many long hours for our internet team,” Smallwood said. “And it’s families like the Jimisons that started this process. Like many folks we serve, they were members in need of a service that wasn’t being supplied by anyone else. Our membership overwhelmingly voted for United to provide high-speed internet. We’ve built our infrastructure with an eye toward the future. Creating a highly scalable network, with built-in redundancies to be as reliable as possible for our membership.”