Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Pass 1 Million Broadband Connection Milestone

The Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas say they recently finished delivering fiber broadband capability to more than one million Arkansans as part of a $4.66 billion expansion.

More than 40,000 miles of fiber have been installed by 17 cooperative broadband providers, including 15 local broadband providers, one wholesale broadband provider, and one middle-mile fiber company.

In a prepared statement, Arkansas cooperatives indicate they have $2.2 billion in additional projects lined up connecting an additional 13,000 residents in the “Natural State.” Once completed, Arkansas cooperatives will have deployed 53,000 miles of fiber and connected 1.2 million state residents to fiber.

Informed by their efforts at rural electrification nearly a century earlier, U.S. electrical cooperatives have increasingly been pushing into fiber broadband deployment. Initially as a way to better monitor and manage complex modern electrical grids, then ultimately as a way to extend access to predominately rural customers trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Nearly 80 percent of the state cooperatives’ investment in fiber infrastructure has been self-funded without grant subsidies, the coalition notes. Many of the markets they’ve targeted have long been neglected by regional cable and phone giants that believe the investment into rural counties isn’t worth the time and resources, or won’t be profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street.  

“Easy high-speed Internet has already been deployed; these were the hard miles,”  Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas CEO Vernon “Buddy” Hasten recently told Arkansas Business. “Co-ops are democratically controlled. The members said, ‘We want this,’ and then we just had to find smart ways to do it from a business perspective to make it viable, just like we have electricity.”

According to data from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), 200 of the nation’s 900 electrical cooperatives have expanded into providing broadband service.

We’ve profiled the efforts of several Arkansas Cooperatives, like First Electric Cooperative – and its broadband subsidiary Connect2First, which leveraged ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding to deliver 2.5 gigabit per second (Gbps) service to 72,000 locations last year.

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Since 2018, Arkansas cooperatives say they have been working on a statewide fiber ring connecting all operational and communication infrastructures, leasing excess capacity to large retailers and driving down the cost of broadband access statewide.

Numerous cooperatives were aided by the state’s 2021 repeal of a restrictive state law – ghost written by the telecom lobby – greatly hampering the deployment of community owned and operated broadband networks in the state. Recent ILSR data indicates that 16 states still have laws restricting the creation, financing, or expansion of community-run broadband networks.

Freshly emboldened by legislative reform, and facing a groundswell of new potential funding in the form of more than a billion in looming infrastructure bill (BEAD) grants, state cooperatives are well positioned to lead the state’s efforts at affordable fiber expansion.

“The locally controlled cooperatives exist to improve the quality of life of the residents in their communities,” Hasten said in a prepared statement celebrating the milestone.

“Just like electricity transformed rural America and rural Arkansas back in the 1930s and 1940s, high-speed broadband is transforming rural Arkansas today. No longer does a person have to live in a metropolitan area to have access to lightning-fast internet service. No longer do young people have to leave their communities to work for a national or international company.”

Inline image of family celebrating their OzarksGo service courtesy of OzarksGo via the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

Inline flyer of Arkansas electric cooperatives offering broadband service courtesy of the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas