Oregon’s Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative just connected its 5,000th customer, marking a major milestone in the Oregon cooperative’s five-year-effort to bring affordable fiber access to rural state residents long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
The recent celebration of the milestone, documented by the Curry Coastal Pilot, featured a homeowner whose recent fiber connection came 80 years after the same cooperative first connected the home for electrical service.
First created in 1939, the Coos-Curry 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.
The cooperative’s fiber wing, dubbed Beacon Broadband, was first launched back in 2021, and offers locals fiber optic broadband at three tiers of service: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $50 a month; a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $85 a month; and symmetrical 2 Gbps tier for $120 a month.
Unlike many regional Oregon private telecom monopolies, Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative’s fiber tiers don’t feature usage caps, long-term contracts, or hidden fees.
The cooperative’s fiber expansion has been a five year, $60 million effort to deploy more than 14,000 miles of fiber optic lines to the cooperative’s 13,995 existing electrical customers peppered along Oregon’s rural southern coast.
The buildout was buoyed by a $20 million grant in 2024 to extend broadband access to an additional 1,228 locations along the Oregon coast. The network currently reaches from Brookings through Gold Beach, Port Orford, and Langlois, with further expansion planned.
"What we've accomplished in just a few years is truly remarkable," Bill Gerski, Vice President of Marketing & Sales for Beacon Broadband, said of the milestone.
A December 2018 survey of the cooperative’s members found that 17 percent of the co-op’s members had no Internet access whatsoever. Another 15 percent only had substandard broadband access that failed to meet the federal definition for minimum broadband speeds.
The cooperative’s website maintains a construction status map tracking past, current, and future fiber deployment plans.
Inline image of Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative HQ courtesy of Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative
