Minburn Communications this week received a $4.7 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to upgrade its copper network to fiber and provide subscribers with voice, broadband and video service.
Minburn Communications was one of only three rural telecommunications projects to land the special USDA loan funds this year. The others are in Arkansas and New Mexico.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the loans in coordination with President Obama’s creation of the Broadband Opportunity Council, co-chaired by Vilsack and U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.
The Minburn Communications project “will deliver enhanced broadband services to help attract and grow businesses, as well as to improve educational and health care services,” Vilsack said. “Time and again, studies show that affordable broadband offers increased economic opportunities in rural areas,” he said.
“Our customers will not be left behind by either the quality or level of service provided to them by Minburn Communications.” –Debra Lucht
Minburn Communications General Manager Debra Lucht said the USDA funding will pay for a “total overbuild” of Woodward’s system, affecting about 870 homes both in town and the surrounding countryside and replacing copper wiring with fiber optic cable.
“When this project is done, every customer we serve will have fully redundant fiber optic service,” Lucht said. “This means about 1,500 customers in the Minburn, Perry and Woodward exchanges.”
She said the completed system will bring customers “a state-of-the-art network. Our customers will not be left behind by either the quality or level of service provided to them by Minburn Communications.”
Fiber optic service was supplied to all Minburn homes and the rural area in 2011 through a $2.3 million USDA loan, Lucht said. Perry was brought into the Minburn Communications fiber optic network in 2014 in a project financed by the company itself.
The Perry project was a “substantial investment,” Lucht said, and a risky one as well because it was not certain Perry residents and businesses would buy the high-speed service. Minburn Communications entered a competitive market in Perry, which is already served by industry heavyweights Mediacom and Century Link.
So far the gamble is paying off, Lucht said, and business in Perry “is meeting and exceeding the benchmarks we’d set.”
Minburn’s independent telephone company, founded in 1903, is a good example of a rural provider upgrading its broadband service, the kind of improvement President Obama and Governor Branstad are promoting as crucial to rural economic development.
