Lenoir City, Tennessee officials say they’re making steady progress on their goal to deliver affordable fiber well beyond the Southern city of 12,998. 

Under the collaborative umbrella of the Lenoir City Utilities Board (LCUB) and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), officials say they’re leveraging century-old experience in rural electrification to help bridge the digital divide across Knox and Loudon counties.

“We’re now in our fourth year of construction on our community broadband network, and we have 37,676 passings available at this time,” Allen Rollings, Director of Broadband at LCUB told ILSR. 

“LCUB will continue to build until our entire electric service territory is able to access our broadband service.”

LCUB’s history dates back to 1938, when Lenoir City signed a contract with the TVA to provide public power. As with many municipalities and cooperatives, this foundational "public utility" mindset helped pave the way for eventually treating broadband as a 21st-century necessity rather than a luxury.

LCUB is the eighth largest utility among the 153 Tennessee Valley Authority distributors, serving over 96,000 electricity customers.

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In 2016, LCUB built an 80-85 mile perimeter fiber ring designed to aid SCADA systems that monitor the electrical grid. Such upgrades improved the utilities’ automated metering, remote fault detection, substation monitoring and overall efficiency.