CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – The Clarksville Department of Electricity (CDE) Lightband has led the charge alongside Cumberland Connect to bring reliable high-speed internet to Clarksville and Montgomery County.
The Internet has come a long way over the years, both in terms of access and speeds. No longer is the public subject to the maddening tones and wait times of dial-up. With fiber internet access to almost every neighborhood, online gaming, TV streaming, and other activities are just a click away.
Many factors have pushed broadband rollout, but the COVID-19 pandemic may have been a catalyst to step up those efforts nationwide.
CDE Lightband
Broadband is a much more common term than it was back in 2007, when the Clarksville Department of Electricity began building a fiber-optic network across the city. But the initial goal wasn’t to provide internet to residents.
“CDE was looking at smart grid technology and ways to tie our substations together to improve communications and improve system reliability from the electric standpoint, and so fiber was that mechanism,” CDE General Manager Brian Taylor told Clarksville Now. “We began looking at rolling out fiber infrastructure for the benefit of the electric division.”
He explained that with the fiber rollout came cries from the public for another video option. With unused bandwidth available, CDE chose to get into the broadband business to help offset the cost of fiber infrastructure. The project moved forward following a referendum vote in 2007 when 73% of Clarksville residents voted in favor of expanding the services.
To pay for the fiber rollout, CDE took out a 30-year $55 million bond and a $17.5 million loan from the CDE electric division. That loan from the electric division was paid off nearly two decades early using broadband revenue, according to Taylor, noting it helped keep electric rates low. In addition, that revenue also helped pay for two new substations and the reconstruction of two others.
“So the way it’s set up now, the electric division owns all of the fiber infrastructure, and then the broadband division acts as a separate division and rents that fiber infrastructure.”
Ahead of the curve
Taylor said Clarksville was ahead of the time when it came to fiber infrastructure, and now, officials with CDE speak to other communities about the do’s and don’ts of rolling out fiber.
“When we launched the municipal broadband, there were only five other municipals that were providing broadband services. So we were one of the first six in the state to provide broadband services. We were way ahead of the curve.”
Staying ahead allowed CDE to better handle the technical troubles that would come as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic brought about an increased need for bandwidth nationwide as it became necessary for work, school, and home entertainment.
“When we went into the 2020 school year, the school system had about 50% of their students that opted to do a virtual school programs and get their education from home,” said Christy Batts, chief broadband officer for CDE. “That puts a bandwidth demand on the school system on both sides, because not only have you got students in their homes that need to connect, but you’ve got teachers that are running virtual classrooms and traditional classrooms.”
She said that on Day 3 of the 2020-21 school year, the school system contacted CDE for help, stating bandwidth at the time would not be enough. By that afternoon, the CDE broadband team had mobilized and were able to double the bandwidth for the school system to a 20-gig capacity.
Over the summer of 2021, CDE continued working with the schools, allowing them to go into the following school year with 40 gigs of bandwidth.
“The success of the broadband division has actually fulfilled its mission as far as helping it pay for infrastructure on the electric side of it. And now today, we’re seeing it helping people with their broadband services and being able to work from home,” Taylor told Clarksville Now.
Cumberland Connect
While CDE takes care of the city, getting broadband in the rural communities outside the city limits has taken a different, but familiar, approach. In Montgomery County and the surrounding areas, the Cumberland Electric Membership Corp. (CEMC) has been working to get those fiber optic cables to every home.
CEMC is an electric co-op that has been in existence since 1938. The co-op, like many in the 1930s, was first established to bring electricity to rural parts of America when electricity was considered a luxury. Over the past few years, the co-op has been working on bringing internet, phone and streaming services through their wholly-owned nonprofit subsidiary, Cumberland Connect, which was established in 2019.
“It’s almost like history repeating itself,” said Mark Cook, CEMC broadband manager at the phase 3 launch event. “It (internet) was a novelty 10 years ago and maybe a luxury five years ago, and now, well, it’s a utility. Now it’s just like electricity. We all know this. We can’t really live our lives effectively with school, work and medicine without it.”
Cumberland Connect launched their first subscriber in 2020, which was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kaitlyn Bonds, Creative Director at Cumberland Connect, told Clarksville Now that the pandemic escalated the need for broadband in the rural community.
“We didn’t want any of that to slow us down. We knew that the need had even become greater with a lot of people working from home.”
Cumberland Connect is, among others nationwide, working to get high-speed fiber internet into the homes of those in rural communities. According to a previous announcement from CEMC, the Sango neighborhoods east of Clarksville will have access to gigabit-speed Internet by the end of 2023. Construction crews are finishing up phase 3 of 5 right now, but expect to have over 5,000 miles of fiber in the ground by 2024.
“We have a really aggressive construction schedule. We are building across our existing electrical infrastructure and we get the question sometimes when people ask if we are piggy-backing on another provider’s network or infrastructure, and the answer is no. We are constructing our fiber network 100% from the ground up,” Bonds said.
CC Academy
Cumberland Connect serves around 80,000 members across five counties, many of which lie in very rural areas. Bonds told Clarksville Now the company has launched free service called CC Academy that works to educate everyone on how to best use their wireless connections.
“We want to make sure our subscribers have the resources and the guidance to get the most out of their internet. Serving some really rural areas, there are some members’ homes that they’ve never had access to the internet before.”
CC Academy hosts onsite, in-person, local workshops and is working to bring more educational content both online and in-person for members to utilize.
“We’ve had really great attendance so far, and we’re looking forward to seeing where that takes us,” Bonds told Clarksville Now.
For more details on CC Academy and free educational materials, visit the Cumberland Connect website. Those with questions about Cumberland Connect can also call 800-987-2362 or email info@cumberlandconnect.org.