I wanted to learn about BrightRidge which is a not-for-profit public utility based in Johnson City, TN and it was nice to know they could exist since 1945 helping to bring electricity to this community, but curiously there is history since 1888!

The original power plant was built by Jame Crumley and replaced by Watauga Lighting and Power Company plant in early 1891. But a couple of years late, on August 1, 1902 Johnson City-Jonesborought Electric Light and Power Company purchased it.

Add alt text

In 1911 a group of brave men conceived the idea of building a hydroelectric power…

Here is a list sorted by volume of investment and my comments:

• Verizon very focused on metro markets, big invest with a lower number of counties
• DISH got an interesting volume of counties, they may use for mobile coverage
• CableCos and Wireline played aggressively, this way they can protect their existing markets from #WISP competitors can leverage #FWA as the last mile and potentially #MVNO traffic offload (Windstream and COX got average 40Mhz in almost all the counties, while Comcast an average of 30Mhz and Charter 20Mz)
• AT&T and Frontier ZERO bids!
• A couple of my WISP friends on the…

#FWA is fashion! And modern now! Yes, thanks for the kype around #5G and #mmWV the whole industry started to pay more attention to the #Wireless alternatives that help to close the #DigitalDivide. The 1st time I saw Ericsson #MobilityReport talking about #FWA I though, that’s it, this will become mainstream. I acknowledge the fact Verizon brought a new fresh look into #FWA business case, but I need to say AT&T is doing it in #LTE for longer than $VZ, and the last Tier 1 in the US to join the mob is T-Mobile, with the advantage they have 600Mhz…

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find many pictures of the old company, I love when I find those 100, 50 years old pictures on how Telco used to be done in the early years!

But CTC started back in 1948, Jesse Holmes and his wife, Sara, already named the company as it is today, CTC, Community Telephone Company, as most of the startups, the company was run out of his house in Scotland, TX until they got knocked by an ice storm. Yes, in Texas we do have ice storms, I got my first one in 2014! …

Rodrigo Mattos started TMW TELECOM in 2002, like most of US Rural ISPs, he started with #Wireless, as #WISP, trying technologies he was creating in-house, overtime the business started to grow.

The 50s look like a special decade for the #Telephone CoOps! Another cooperative founded in the decade, precisely in 1952, is BEK (Burleigh, Emmons and Kidder) North Dakota!

The best stories are when I don’t even need to change a single line to make it more interesting, this is the case of Peoples:

“Organized in 1952, Peoples Telephone continues to provide dependable, high-quality #telephone service in Wood County and beyond. In 1953, the GOLDEN exchange was bought from Mr. and Mrs. G. A. Mason, with the first pole line being raised on August 13th of the same year. With the aid of government funds made possible under the Rural Electrification Act, Peoples began with 263 members in five exchanges. By 1960, subscribership had reached 1,000 and two more…