From the Top with CEO Patrick Grace

Have you heard? OEC Fiber crossed the 1,000 subscriber mark three months to the day after opening service to the public. It's been remarkable to see this plan go from a single spreadsheet to serving over 1,000 homes and businesses. It's a tremendous accomplishment, and we aren't slowing down.

If you remember, we spent most of 2017 studying the feasibility and learning the need for high-speed internet was very real in our communities and rural areas. We first attached fiber to our electric poles in April 2018, then in February 2019 — only ten months later — began offering service to our members. In May, we connected the 1,000th subscriber to our fiber network.

From our first conversations with our project consultants, we knew we were capable of building out our network at a very quick pace. With a strong commitment from our board of trustees, we dove in head first. At every level, we knew we would not sacrifice reliability for the speed of construction. We wanted to do things correctly and efficiently the first time, because our rural members need reliable, high-speed internet sooner rather than later.

We really had no benchmark until we saw what other electric co-ops were doing with their fiber projects. A few other co-ops in northeast Oklahoma were already in the fiber business, so we were able to model some of our project after theirs.

We are one of the fastest growing — if not the fastest growing — fiber co-op projects in the nation. We know our members have a great need for this service and are stopping at nothing to get them the service they deserve at the price they deserve.

Some issues we've encountered along the way include rightof-way crossing railroad tracks, differing telecommunications construction codes and, mainly, the logistics of working with every available locator to locate lines in the areas we are building into.

It hasn't stopped us from getting service to as many subscribers as possible as quickly as possible. After all, this has always been a member-led initiative, and we will work until everyone in our service area is proud to be an OEC Fiber subscriber.