Officials with the West Kentucky and Tennessee Telecommunications Cooperative say they are nearing the halfway point in a project to provide the region with high-speed fiber-optic service.
The more-than $120 million project has 700 miles of broadband cable left to install, leaving the final, and lengthier exchange process left. Officials in 2009 announced a switch from the slower copper lines to the 20 percent faster fiber-optic cable.
WK&T Marketing and Sales Manager Michael Lee says that was an important decision for the company’s more-than twenty-thousand customers.
“Twenty years ago when we were just talking about dial-tone, that copper network was fine,” he said. “But when we’re talking about broadband, we need a more advanced fiber-to-the-home-type network that allows us to deploy whatever the customer wants with no limitations.”
WK&T is paying for the project with federal grant money and project loans. The cooperative will have more than $60 million plus interest in loans to pay back.
