McKee, Kentucky is a small town that sits mostly within the Daniel Boone National Forest and is about a one-hour, 20 minute drive from Lexington, the nearest big city.
The town has just over 800 people, and the median household income is around $17,500, according to the U.S. Census. The state’s median household income is about $60,000.
It’s also one of the cities with the best broadband internet connections in the country. That’s because the tiny town of McKee is the headquarters of the People’s Rural Telephone Cooperative. And thanks to PRTC’s vision ten years ago to start laying fiber wireless broadband, every home and business in the city has had high-speed broadband fiber internet since 2014.
With Congress just recently authorizing trillions for projects to help rural areas access better broadband internet through the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act − and the state’s “Kentucky Wired” project mired in controversy − the story of what PRTC achieved a decade ago seems that much more phenomenal.
I spoke with Keith Gabbard, the CEO and General Manager and decades-long employee of PRTC.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Tell me about PRTC: How did it get started and what is it today?
Former manager Charley Gray of the PRTC (Peoples RTA) organizes a truck with telephone wires in the early 1950s. Gray was the manager of PRTC before Keith Gabbard replaced him upon his retirement in Jan 1996.
In 1950 this company started a nonprofit cooperative. We didn’t have telephone service in these two counties that we serve. No big company was planning on coming in to give us service. So, we formed our own company. In the 1930s that’s how electric cooperatives got started in rural America. In 1950, the government started with telephone [service] with programs that gave out low-interest loans.
I started in 1976. Twenty years later I was lucky enough to become the CEO. We were just getting into the internet at that time. It was dialup.
We are also part-owner of a wireless company. Owning the wireless company has helped us do some things with fiber that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.
Early 2000s we got into the television business − bought a couple of local cable companies. They were just doing TV cable, not broadband. Then, in about 2008, we learned pretty quickly that DSL was not very good for internet. So, there were some companies doing fiber in the home and we thought “heck, maybe we ought to try that?”
We borrowed $20 million from the USDA and we were a year into that build when another stimulus act came out. We applied for some funds, a combination loan/grant. So, that was another $25 million. It took us six years to do it: 2008-2014. But we built every single home and business with fiber broadband internet in these two counties we serve: Jackson and Owsley.
What challenges do you face with setting up broadband internet in this kind of mountain, forest terrain?
A third of our two counties are in Daniel Boone National Forest. It is a challenge.
We don’t bury much. Most of it’s aerial, a lot of rock. Probably about 70% of our cable is aerial. Parts of our community are a little flatter, not in the forest. If you came here, it’s gonna be a lot of trees. You’re gonna see mountains, streams. In McKee we have a mountain on each side, the main street and the creek. That’s why PRTC has eight buildings. It’s not even a flat enough area to put everything in one place.
When people come to visit me they’ll stop at two of our buildings first before they reach my office.
You’re headquarters are in McKee, Kentucky in Jackson County. Why is your HQ here?
PRTC employee R.C. Hibbitts and his mule, “Old Bub,” hang fiber broadband wire in Eastern Kentucky.
Owsley is even smaller. The poverty may be even worse. Keep in mind, in 1950, these were the two counties that didn’t have service. I grew up in McKee and I could see the telephone office from my house.
My wife and I went to college together at Eastern Kentucky University and we wanted to come back to Jackson County and work. I got a job here answering phones, I think I was making $3.75 an hour.
Now, I have the best job in the world. I get to stay home and help my community.
One of the things I want to be clear about is this is a team effort. We have a seven-member board of directors and all this has to go through them. I am not important enough or smart enough to have this magical formula for all this to come together.
I feel like we’re making a difference in Eastern Kentucky.
How do you think PRTC was so far ahead of the game?
A lot of companies don’t want to invest the money in these low population, rural areas. The small companies, and there are more than us in Eastern Kentucky, we partner on a lot of things. We live here, we see the need. The services we provide can make a big difference in the quality of life here.
When we finished this fiber project in 2014, we had better service than Louisville or Lexington.
I’ll tell you how we’re taught in Eastern Kentucky: You don’t go bragging on yourself. Keep your head down and do your work. If you do a good job, they’ll notice it. For most of my life, that’s the way I lived. But then I realized I needed to do something different to tell people what we’re doing here. Not what I’m doing, but what we’re doing here at PRTC.
How has having such high quality broadband internet changed people’s lives here?
CEO and General Manager of PRTC, Keith Gabbard, in 2023.
Education. Some of our counties were already set up to do classes from home when bad weather hit. Not that we get so much snow but when we do our roads are so curvy that buses can’t go. This was before the pandemic hit. And of course when the pandemic hit we were already setup so kids could go to school from home with the fiber broadband internet.
Then, work from home transformed everything. Not only are we seeing people moving in here to work from home, but we set up a program partnering with groups in Kentucky [to help people work from home]. We provide people with a place to train people to help them get work from home jobs.
We probably helped 1,000-1,200 people get work from home jobs.
And then health care. We partnered with our local library, put broadband in it and designated it for veterans to do their doctor appointments, even though they could do it from home if they had broadband. It was like the first one in the country.
Doesn’t sound like rocket science, does it?
Carli Pierson
Carli Pierson is the Voices/Opinion Editor at USA Today. You can follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @CarliPiersonEsq.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Eastern Kentucky’s PRTC and it’s high speed internet story
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Publish date : 2024-09-08 21:28:00
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