United Communications, a service owned by not-for-profit electric cooperative Middle Tennessee Electric (MTE), will invest another $85 million to expand fiber internet service to 77,000 MTE members in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The United-backed investment will contribute to several multi-year projects totaling 1,400 route miles of new fiber-optic lines that can deliver multi-gig service. As part of a co-op, United reinvests 100% of its cash flow back into its network and customer services, CEO William Bradford told Fierce Telecom. The provider has already invested more than $30 million in Rutherford County, including a recently completed fiber project connecting 18,000 homes and businesses in neighboring Smyrna.
Speaking at an MTE meeting this week, Bradford said the company has already completed “phase one” in Murfreesboro, which includes a fiber backbone and service to more than 1,000 homes and businesses.
The provider also partnered with Murfreesboro Housing Authority to provide free internet service to qualifying households in low-income communities.
United expects the new investment in Murfreesboro will bring around 150 new jobs to the area. MTE recently acquired three buildings in Murfreesboro formerly occupied by Blackbox Network Services, which is where some of the 150 new United employees will be located, according to a statement from CEO Chris Jones.
As part of MTE, United is afforded good visibility into the local utility network, enabling the company’s network design to “follow power,” Bradford said. Essentially, the company uses that visibility to attach fiber where power already exists, whether that’s in the air or in the ground, and to see “where it can attach and where changes have to be made to support attachments.”
“Being able to work together to get service to members really does allow us to build a higher quality network and be a lot smarter in terms of how we go about deploying it,” Bradford said, noting that this design strategy also provides the “least amount of disturbance” for municipalities and homeowners.
“We're not having to cut into sidewalks and roads and do the other things that cause a lot of problems, especially in dense municipal areas,” he added.
The Murfreesboro projects won’t tap into any Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds. Nor will it use any money from the ReConnect program, which has helped support United’s separate initiative dubbed Project Unite. In 2022, the provider was also awarded $53.4 million in grant support from the Tennessee Emergency Broadband Fund to expand fiber internet service in rural communities in the state.
United is currently wrapping up some ReConnect projects with 10,000 locations across five Tennessee counties expected to be online in 2024. Meanwhile, the provider is doing “a lot of analysis around BEAD” as states prepare to dole out their allocations from the $42.5 billion program. Bradford called BEAD “a big, important piece of the puzzle” in getting to those hardest to reach areas that remain unserved.
United has been "very aggressively building out to rural unserved areas and will try to leverage any program possible," added Bradford.