When Will We Get Fiber

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Published on Monday, 24 August 2015 14:09

When will we get fiber?

 

UPDATED: July 25, 2023

In February, I celebrated my 11th anniversary with West Texas Rural Telephone Cooperative and W T Services. I continue to be honored to have been selected to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of our companies. I am proud of the Team we've built and the many accomplishments we have achieved.

 • In 2022, we completed our fiber project in the rural service area of West Texas Rural Telephone Cooperative. We received funding from the Federal Communications Commission in 2017, which allowed us to accelerate the installation of fiber. We have completed the 1500 linear miles of fiber in 5 years. Our members can be proud they have joined the ranks of only a few rural companies like ours to have fiber-to-the-premise. We chose to take fiber to your premises because the copper line from our node to your home was 70 years old, just like the remainder of our facilities. It made sense to do this because now, we have built a network of the future.

 • We have added a Voice over Internet Protocol Telephone System to our products. This is a cloud-based system, and the cloud will remain local.

 • We have built redundancies in our network. In May 2021, we had a major fiber cut on our fiber that runs along 1-40 in Amarillo. Because of the redundancy, you were never aware of the outage. Our Construction Team worked tirelessly for over 7 hours to repair the damage to our fiber, all the while being mindful that a major storm with tornados was approaching.

 • We have entered into an agreement with our engineering consulting firm who has developed a Network Operations Center that assists us in monitoring our network on a 24 X 7 basis. The NOC personnel become aware of issues impacting our network and services, likely before we do, and they alert us. One incident happened last year, when an impaired driver ran over our equipment (and another provider's equipment) at 3:00 am on a Saturday morning. The NOC alerted our on-call supervisor. After investigating the damage, our Team repaired the equipment before anyone knew we were out of service in that area (around 9:30 am that morning).

 • Nearly every component of our network has been updated during the past decade, including, but not limited to:

  o Installation of a DDOS Server to capture attacks on IP addresses in our network.

  o Installation of DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) technology over our fiber that transits the rural area into Amarillo. This technology fractionalizes the fiber optics and expands its capacity exponentially.

  o Upgrade to our IPTV System

  o Installation of a backup central office switch in Friona that is a mirror to the central office switch in Hereford.

  o Partnered with neighboring telephone cooperatives to connect our networks. If our network is compromised (as the fiber cut last May), then the traffic is automatically routed over the neighboring partners networks to Lubbock and vice versa.

  o We have conducted a cybersecurity audit and subsequently rearranged some parts of our network to make it more difficult to hack. We will continue to have these audits in the future because these attacks are increasing.

  o We installed a new billing system that allows payments online and allows us to operate more efficiently.

We have spent more than $45 million on network and equipment upgrades over the past decade. We continually work to make sure our network is up to date to serve you well for decades to come.

We are local, we live and work where you live. When you call on us for assistance, you get a real live, local person. You don't dial an 800 # in a distant call center with a bunch of prompts and you don't have to speak with representatives in another country. Being local also brings the added benefit of being responsive to your needs in a timely manner, second to none.

We are not only local, but we also can reach distant locations, globally. We are a Preferred Vendor with AT&T and have a direct connection with them at their South Tyler Building in Amarillo.

There is nothing the large commercial companies can offer that we can't do for you. With all the redundancies we have installed in our network, we can say we can serve you better. We don't have to dispatch repair from a distant city on our timeline, we are right here.

We invite you to meet with us so we can learn about your future communications needs and prepare to continue to serve you in the way you deserve.

To arrange for a meeting or if you have any questions, please contact Raquel Vallejo or one of our Business Solutions Team members: Bennie Gonzales, Julie Brooks, or Ruben Coronado at 364-3331.

Best Regards,

Amy Linzey

Chief Executive Officer