Ben Leonard is a 94-year-old pastor from Cabot, Arkansas, who remembers when electricity came to his home in 1947 and who was recently connected to fiber broadband.
Telecompetitor spoke with Ben Leonard and Randy Everett — the chief broadband officer of First Electric Cooperative Corporation and its subsidiary Connect2First Internet — about memories of receiving electricity and fiber broadband in a single lifetime.
The story starts nearly 80 years ago. Leonard’s father applied for service via the local electric co-op in November 1946, and Leonard’s house was connected to electricity in July 1947.
Before that, Leonard recalled, “We’d go down in the field to where the well was. We hauled our water to the house in a 55-gallon barrel — we had to do that, especially on wash day for my mom. It’d take about three or four trips to the well to get enough water to do the week’s washing.
“So, we looked forward to when we would get electricity. Then, when we got it, we got a pump put in the well, and we pumped the water to the house. And my mom thought she’d died and gone to heaven when she had a spigot in the kitchen, and she could turn the water on.”
Fast-forward more than 70 years, and First Electric Cooperative Corporation decided to bring fiber broadband to the area in addition to their electricity service. Everett said the national trend of rural electric co-ops expanding into broadband, and the federal funding available for broadband expansion, were the primary reasons First Electric moved into fiber.
On Everett’s recommendation to the First Electric board, the co-op started adding a fiber backbone to their electric lines to connect their offices and their substations.
“When we started hanging fiber, our members noticed that we were hanging fiber in their yard, and they wanted to know when they could get connected,” Everett says. “They started calling board members.” The board members tried to explain to co-op members that they weren’t planning to provide rural broadband.
“But it became a very hot topic, and we began looking into what it would take,” Everett said. “Our board decided that, just like electricity, these areas in the rural parts of America had been left out and left behind on [broadband]. And if anybody was going to do it — or if anybody could do it — the co-ops would be the best entities to carry that forward.”
Five years later, First Electric has deployed 6,000 miles of fiber through their subsidiary Connect2First. They’ve connected about 32,600 customers so far and continue to connect hundreds more every month.
Before Leonard was connected to the Connect2First network, he had a connection that was subject to interruption any time there was bad weather.
Everett is a member of Victory Baptist Church, where Leonard served as a pastor. “He kept asking me, ‘When are you going to get me internet?’” said Everett. First Electric connected Leonard to reliable fiber broadband just over 76 years after Leonard’s boyhood home received electricity.
These days, Leonard uses the internet for security cameras at his house, communicating with family who live two hours away in Monticello, Arkansas, and streaming TV. “A lot of that I don’t understand,” Leonard said. “This kind of stuff was not made for a 94-year-old man! It’s amazing to me that you can contact people around the world. It just blows my mind.”
Victory Baptist streams the service every week, and Leonard is impressed by how the internet helps them share their message. “It’s another way we feel like God has given us opportunities and methods to reach people on opposite ends of the earth. I checked to see how many [streamers] we had on a given Sunday, and we’d had 181 who had plugged into us.”
Everett said the community’s response to the fiber network has been “overwhelmingly positive. Not only are we providing a service for our community and our members, but it’s almost a necessity — whether it’s for education, home health, work from home, it’s just so many different [opportunities] that we’re providing to our members through the internet.
He stressed the importance of a reliable connection — “fiber all the way into the home, into the modem” — and the fact that members get the same local service for their broadband connection as for their electricity.
“We’re not always the cheapest option, because our price is our price. We set our price almost five years ago, and we haven’t had any price increases. There’s no sales gimmick. And our members really appreciate the honesty. They appreciate the service, the consistency, and the genuine feeling that the co-op cares about the community.”
Everett concluded by remarking that the co-op model reminds him of the biblical injunction to serve others.
“Hey, this sounds like a church service!” Leonard interjected. “It’s about time to take the offering.”
