Michigan-based Thumb Electric Cooperative says its ongoing fiber deployment has hit a new milestone: its 4000th connected broadband subscriber.

The cooperative’s latest customer, Verona Hills Golf Course in Huron County, Michigan, comes three years after the cooperative joined the growing trend of expanding into broadband access.

"We're very proud to reach this milestone," Cooperative Marketing and Communication Specialist Mitch Hirn said of the cooperative’s ongoing expansion.

"We look to continue our buildout over the next few years. We want more people to sign up for high-speed, reliable internet. The vast majority of our customers have been very pleased with our service."

In deployed markets Thumb offers two tiers of fiber broadband service via its TEC Fiber subsidiary: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $85 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) offering for $125 a month. The cooperative’s fiber tiers do not feature usage caps, hidden fees, or long-term contracts.

First created in 1938, the Thumb Electric Cooperative is one of over 200 U.S. electrical cooperatives leveraging their century-old experience in rural electrification to bring affordable fiber access to long-neglected parts of the country – markets that in most cases were left behind by regional telecom monopolies disinterested in improving affordable access.

According to data from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), 700 of the nation’s 900 electrical cooperatives have yet to expand into broadband access, so there’s plenty of legroom for additional cooperatives to join the ongoing trend.

Along the shores of Lake Huron and across three rural counties in Michigan’s Thumb region, an electric cooperative is putting its thumb on the scale in favor of bringing fiber-to-the-home Internet service to its members.

Nearly 85 years after first delivering electricity to the region, Thumb Electric Cooperative (TEC) General Manager Dallas Braun announced the co-op had “started to lay the groundwork for a similar mission.”

“The mission,” he wrote in a recent edition of Michigan Country Lines, “is to provide much-needed fiber Internet service to those same sparsely populated areas by building a projected $80 million fiber network infrastructure that will be the superhighway of the Internet for future generations.”

The mandate came from members who saw ubiquitous access to high-speed Internet connectivity as a necessity of modern life much like the region’s rural farmers in the 1930s pined for electricity as they saw city residents enjoy a higher standard of electrified living.

Image

It led to the creation of TEC Fiber – a new subsidiary of the TEC which currently serves 12,300 residents and businesses in Huron, Sanilac, and Tuscola Counties.

Foray into Broadband with an Air Advantage