Whenever a fiber network is installed in a particular community, it’s a big deal.
Most recently, we reported on the $7 million public-private partnership that will allow residents in Bullitt County to have fiber. In early September, I wrote about how Stupp Fiber was in the process of covering a large portion of Bowling Green with 10 gigabit fiber.
What may not be as well known, though, is that there are two counties in Eastern Kentucky, Jackson and Owsley, whose approximately 7,000 households have been connected to fiber — 1,000 miles of it — since 2014 that can get up to one gigabit per second (with ongoing efforts to increase that speed).
The $50 million project began in 2008, said Keith Gabbard, the CEO and general manager of the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (PRTC), based out of the town of McKee, Kentucky.
I met Gabbard by way of Erik Hubbard, founder and executive director of Backroads of Appalachia while walking around the grounds of the Corbin Arena in Corbin, Kentucky, at the SOAR (Shaping Our Appalachian Region) Summit last week.
He told me there has been an ongoing effort to install fiber in portions of five additional counties (Laurel, Rockcastle, Perry, Clay and Breathitt) while completely covering Lee County through a combination of government grants, grant loans and money paid by PRTC. The expansion so far has cost somewhere in the vicinity of $15 million to $20 million. Gabbard said that when completed, more than 2,200 miles of fiber will be installed, 1,500 has already been done. The project should be done in the next five years.
Gabbard also told me about the time that PRTC made national news when it appeared in a 2019 article in The New Yorker. The story came to fruition after the author, Sue Halpern, had so many issues with her connectivity issues living in rural Vermont that she reached out to the Rural Broadband Association for a small town that had flawless connection speeds. She was given the name of McKee.
PRTC partners with an organization called Hazard, Kentucky-based Teleworks USA that serves as a “work-from-home employment service,” according to its site. It is an arm of the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program (EKCEP).
In 2023 alone, as of recent date, Teleworks USA provided services to 302 job seekers with 152 finding jobs, according to a EYCEP representative. Gabbard said that in Jackson and Owsley said that approximately 1,200 people found jobs in six years through the program.
Gabbard shared a story about how one day he met a man at the post office who had moved to Jackson County. He and his wife both work in cybersecurity. They recently bought a farm and were homeschooling their children. He heard about McKee from (you guessed it) The New Yorker article.
“My whole life, it’s been sort of a stepchild of Kentucky, and I would love to play a small part in changing things. My whole life growing up [in Jackson County] it was ‘We don’t have a four-lane highway. We don't have a hospital. We don’t have a college … Everything we don’t have — and now we’ve got something that everybody else wants.”
Several counties in Eastern Kentucky have recently taken part in the website MakeMyMove.com where those who want to move to a particular part of the country can do so provided they fit certain criteria, such as the appropriate income level of $70,000.
At the Middle Tech live podcast recorded on the evening of Oct. 3, Sabrina McWhorter, director of business and innovation at SOAR, said so far, more than 1,300 applications had been submitted — with a handful already having been approved.
“It’s gonna be really cool to have these players from other regions come in and to give some advice,” McWhorter said, “But even more so, it’s gonna be really cool to see them move here and then learn from Appalachia, and the culture … here and see how they can coexist.”
Added Lexington, Kentucky-based investor Lincoln Brown, about the region’s combination of rustic beauty and affordability: “I don’t know if it’s the right time now, maybe later [but] … Eastern Kentucky has an unfair advantage, if they want to take advantage.”
