Central Rural Electric Cooperative serves more than 23,000 meters across seven counties in north-central Oklahoma. For more than 10 years, the cooperative has been working to increase system reliability and support connectivity for its rural membership, however, efforts to do so have fallen short of reaching everyone.
“The pandemic really highlighted the disparity of access to high-speed internet,” said Hunter Robinson, CEO of Central. “There were parts of our service area with limited or no access.”
The need to prepare the grid for the future and support rural connectivity became even more evident when Central learned that one school district in its service area estimated that 40% of its students lacked access to high-speed internet. This data was confirmed in 2020 when the State Board of Education shared that approximately 25% of Oklahoma public-school children lack access to home internet.
In March 2020 Central sent a survey seeking feedback from a random selection of its members on their interest in fiber internet. The results were overwhelmingly positive: 97% supported moving forward with fiber.
Other key findings included:
- 83% of the members surveyed currently had internet service.
- Of those who did not have internet service, reasons for not subscribing were expense (37%), followed by availability (29%) and reliability (27%); 8% indicated they do not want/need internet service.
- The most common internet connections were land-based wireless at 37% and satellite internet at 31%.
Prior to launching its fiber subsidiary, Centranet, the cooperative’s 22 electrical substations had fiber communications, but that’s where the fiber stopped. Now, the fiber project is providing significant advantages and positioning of the cooperative for the future demands of the grid.
“Communicating with downline devices allows for a preemptive strategy that could avoid outages and assist with predicting the location of faults,” Robinson said. ”Ultimately, these steps will increase system reliability and safety. Expanding fiber communications throughout our entire service area will increase our connectivity in the field, as well as allow for more automation capabilities, which will make us more efficient and benefit our members.”
Centranet LLC is a locally-owned and operated subsidiary of Central Rural Electric Cooperative located in Stillwater, Okla., and is a member of the Cooperative Broadband Coalition.