Congress has approved trillions of dollars in new spending through the Control Inflation Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. In his “Breaking Ground” series, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal visits communities across the country to see how this infusion of federal funds is changing the economy in complex, unseen and even contradictory ways.
In the third and final episode of our Broadband special, Ryssdal visits the town of McKee, Kentucky, where every home and business has been connected to fiber optic internet since 2014, a full decade ahead of the goal the federal government is currently trying to achieve with its Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program.
To hear the story, click on the audio player above.
The town of McKee, Kentucky, population 800, was ahead of its time.
The federal government is currently implementing the $42.45 billion BEAD program, with the goal of connecting every home to high-speed internet by 2030. In McKee, the nonprofit Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative has already been doing just that for a decade.
“We were originally founded to serve two very rural, very poor counties in eastern Kentucky,” PRTC CEO Keith Gabbard said.
PRTC has about 55 employees and is based in Jackson County, where McKee is the county seat. McKee’s median household income is about $18,000, less than a third of Kentucky’s overall, according to 2022 census data.
When it was founded in the 1950s, the cooperative only offered telephone service, but now it also offers television and internet. Initially, PRTC connected the two counties to dial-up internet, then DSL.
“DSL wasn’t giving people the speeds they wanted, so we were constantly trying to rebuild and upgrade,” Gabbard said, “and then in 2008 we heard a little bit about fiber optics and thought we’d take a loan.”
PRTC borrowed $45 million from the federal government, part of which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Great Recession-era economic stimulus bill. The company also put in $5 million of its own money to connect the two counties, for a total of $50 million. The project was completed in 2014.
“We’re definitely one of the first in Kentucky,” Gabbard said of fiber optic internet, “and one of the first in the country.”
Jackson County’s topography makes installing fiber optics, which are typically buried underground, particularly difficult and expensive: A quarter of the county lies within Daniel Boone National Forest, which represents the region’s Appalachian Mountain topography.
“The area has so many mountains and rocks that we can’t bury the cables underground, so they’re mostly overhead,” Gabbard said. “There are far more trees than people and houses.”
The combined population of Jackson and Owsley counties served by PRTC is about 18,000 people, many of whom live far apart in rural areas, meaning the cost of connecting homes was especially high, but Gabbard said PRTC benefited from being a nonprofit.
“If we can break even and provide the services the public needs over the long term, that’s our objective,” Gabbard said.
PRTC is currently expanding its fiber optic internet coverage to other neighboring counties, and the company will likely apply for some of Kentucky’s $1.1 billion in BEAD funding to complete those construction projects, which Gabbard said will also require PRTC to hire more staff.
Installation and Repair Technical Supervisor Matt Bingham currently oversees a team of about 20 people who install and troubleshoot fiber optics. He has been with PRTC since 2011 and, like Gabbard, was born and raised in Jackson County.
“I was going to go to county school and I was going to go to college,” Bingham said. “I think it was around my senior year of high school that I started to get serious about going to college, but I didn’t want to go to school another four, six, eight years. So I started thinking, ‘What can I do if I stay in county?'”
Bingham originally helped install the internet using copper wire, then became part of the team that connected the county with fiber optics.
“It’s not exactly the same from then to now,” Bingham says, “but it wasn’t that hard to learn. The mechanics and effects are surreal. When you think about information passing through a piece of glass the size of a hair, it just doesn’t seem real.”
Since fiber optic cable was installed in Jackson County in 2014, Bingham has seen the difference it has made to his hometown.
“When I was in high school and dating my wife, we’d drive down the street and I could name all the houses,” Bingham said. “Now it’s people from Texas, Wyoming, Oregon. When I was doing installations, I had customers who I knew were from somewhere else, and I asked them, ‘How did you hear about Jackson County?’ And they said they saw it online. They were all Jackson County.”
The Marketplace team spoke with several people who moved to Jackson County from other states and cities in Kentucky because broadband allows them to work remotely and live in a rural area. In addition to people moving to town, Gabbard noted that broadband also helps with access to education and health care.
“I was taught from an early age to give back to the community,” Gabbard said, noting that her father became Mayor McKee after retiring. “I know the company doesn’t make everything great here, but we play a role, and in the last 10 to 20 years, we’ve played a bigger role.”
Gabbard has worked for PRTC for nearly 50 years, having started at the company in 1976 answering phones.
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