An interesting new partnership has been formed between Windstream and Colquitt Electric Membership Corp. of Georgia to build a rural fiber network. Windstream is a large price-cap telco that recently emerged from an interesting bankruptcy. Colquitt is a rural electric cooperative.

Only high-level terms of the partnership have been released. Windstream will own the fiber network, will provide broadband and other services, and will own the customers. Colquitt will provide access and rights-of-ways on poles and Colquitt technicians will place the new fiber on poles. Colquitt will get access to some fibers on the new network to connect electric substations and other electric network components to fiber. The partnership is described as having a network that is ‘jointly built and jointly-owned’.

The area to be served is rural and is described as having around 7 people per square mile. It’s a little hard to put that statistic into perspective because the most commonly used metric in the industry for understanding density is the number of homes per mile of road – however, the area sounds sparsely populated.

The state of Georgia decided a few years ago to allow electric cooperatives to become ISPs – a restriction that was imposed years ago by legislation prompted by telco incumbents. Many states have recently lifted such restrictions in an attempt to find more solutions to solve the rural broadband gap.

Partnerships with larger price-cap telephone companies to provide fiber broadband is a new phenomenon. An argument can be made that decisions made by price-cap telcos over the years are one of the major reasons why much of rural America is still served by DSL broadband provided over old and poorly-maintained copper networks.

But we’ve seen several similar partnerships with price-cap telcos. CenturyLink has partnered with the City of Springfield, Missouri to provide fiber. Consolidated Communications has partnered with several villages in New Hampshire to build fiber. Cincinnati Bell has partnered with the Butler Rural Electric Cooperative in Ohio.

This announcement is a reminder to rural communities and electric cooperatives that broadband partners might be found in unexpected places. It’s easy for rural folks to assume that the telcos that built and have been operating the dreadful copper networks are not interested in providing better service. In this case, the network is being built in a rural community and it’s extremely unlikely that Windstream could justify investing the full cost to build fiber – the return and payback on investment would never meet corporate earnings metrics and would make no sense as an investment. However, sharing the costs with the electric cooperative must have reduced Windstream’s costs to the point where the project makes financial sense.

That is the power of partnerships. Investing all of the cost to build fiber in this case probably didn’t make financial sense to either the electric cooperative or to Windstream. Both parties have something to gain out of the transaction. Windstream gains customers who will like the broadband service on fiber. The cooperative gets a fiber network connecting substations. Both are contributing to an improved community that will benefit both companies in the long-term. We’ve seen that fiber can reinvigorate a rural community. Many people want to live in rural areas but need good broadband to work from home – having a fiber network should attract new residents and keep residents some local people from leaving the area to find better broadband.

During the last year, my advice to rural communities is to have a serious discussion with the incumbent providers. Historically I’ve always advised to not bother with the incumbents because over decades I had never seen a large incumbent telco respond to plea to improve service. This is still a rare occurrence, but this partnership, and the ones mentioned earlier illustrate that it’s worth having the discussion on the outside chance that you hit the right note and the right opportunity to get the attention of the incumbents.