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1. #BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN EMC POWER SOURCES HOW TO#
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3. #BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN EMC POWER SOURCES UPGRADE#

The service provider began building more than $750,000 worth of new fiber infrastructure in other unserved and underserved portions of its system. “There has been a learning curve to lift our marketing efforts up to a point where we could get recognition and become the first choice.”Īs BRMEMC looks for ways to expand and improve its broadband offerings and other value-added services, it achieved several milestones in the past two years. He adds that although BRMEMC felt it had better service than traditional telcos, the challenge was to get the word out about its services. “It takes marketing and understanding some of those things that, as a co-op, we traditionally never had to think about.” “It took a long time to get to the point where you start to look at things differently – where you are in a competitive market,” Frizzell says. Like other electric cooperatives that have launched broadband, BRMEMC acknowledges broadband is quite different from the electric utility business, in which for many years it enjoyed a near monopoly.

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Georgia Senate Bill 2, which gives statutory authority to the state’s 41 electric cooperatives to provide broadband services, encouraged BRMEMC to expand and upgrade its broadband network. Service in Georgia is generally limited to the incorporated areas of Blairsville, Murphy, Hiawassee and Young Harris. Initially offering residential customers a mixture of DSL and dial-up internet services, BRMEMC has rapidly expanded its FTTH platform.ī, the operating broadband unit, continues to extend its FTTH service area. “Whereas a lot of co-ops eased into the business by using the fiber for the electric grid, our focus was to provide broadband.”

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“Our driver was that our members wanted service,” says Daniel Frizzell, director of engineering for BRMEMC. Unlike other co-ops that installed fiber to satisfy supervisory control and data acquisition requirements for the electric grid, BRMEMC’s broadband move was based on a simple principle: supply service in places that have none.

The provider currently offers electric and FTTH broadband services to Fannin, Towns and Union counties in northern Georgia and in Clay and Cherokee counties in western North Carolina.īRMEMC’s broadband journey is far from typical. BRMEMC, founded in 1938, is a member-owned electric cooperative headquartered in Young Harris, Georgia, serving more than 53,000 member-customers.

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Several electric co-ops in the Southeast have contacted BRMEMC for advice about how to deploy a broadband network. Electric cooperatives have given hope to the rural broadband market, and Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation (BRMEMC), in the broadband industry for more than 17 years, has earned the right to call itself a pioneer in that emerging space.