Delaware County Broadband Initiative Nears Its Goal of 100% Service

Delaware County Electric Cooperative (DCEC) partnered with two local telephone companies to become the Delaware County Broadband Initiative (DCBI). DCBI was awarded $2.9 million in 2014 by the Southern Tier Economic Development Council. DCBI has been a joint collaboration between Margaretville Telephone Company (MTC), Delhi Telephone Company (DTC) and Delaware County Electric Cooperative (DCEC). DCBI will extend broadband service to approximately 1,800 un-served and underserved DCEC members and their neighbors located in the Townships of Andes, Colchester, Hamden, Hardenburgh, Harpersfield, Jefferson, Kortright, and Meredith. The total DCBI project is estimated at over $6,700,000 including $3.7 million in private investment, $2.9 million in NYS grant funding, $25,000 from the Catskill Watershed Corporation, and funding from the Town of Hardenburgh Rising Community Program.

The Delaware County Broadband Initiative (DCBI) is getting close to our goal of 100% of the Cooperative’s members having access to high speed Internet access at competitive prices. DCEC will be only the second rural electric cooperative in the United States to achieve that milestone. The first Cooperative did it by investing tens of millions of dollars in their own fiber optic network. DCEC is accomplishing it through the power of partnerships. The Cooperative’s partners in DCBI are the Delhi Telephone Company (DTC) and the Margaretville Telephone Company (MTC). Both of these local companies are entirely vested in the future economic viability of the local communities they serve. They do not have a “plan B” like the regional and national communications companies. Bigger companies like Verizon that serve large metropolitan areas like New York City may view our rural communities as a bad investment. Those bigger companies do not rely on future revenues from our rural communities to stay profitable. This is quite evident when you look at how little these large companies have invested in the last several decades in their service territories throughout our region. 

The giant communications companies would much rather invest money to improve their down-state networks than invest in new fiber networks to serve our rural area. The exact opposite is true of our partners, DTC and MTC. These local partners only serve our local communities and their entire viability depends on continued vibrancy of our local economies. Our partners may be small compared to the regional and national communications companies, but they have made the large investment needed to build an expansive fiber network and to bring broadband to our members. 

The DCBI team is almost wrapped up with the portions of the fiber network that are receiving grant dollars, but the project doesn’t end there. The DCBI team will continue construction through the 4th quarter of 2019 and into 2020 in what we call the “non-grant areas.” That means that DTC and MTC are absorbing the entire cost of construction in these last remaining areas of the Cooperative’s service territory so that every single member of the Cooperative will have access to broadband Internet service. The Cooperative is blessed to have partners like DTC and MTC, who are bringing broadband to 100% of our members.