TCT taking fiber optic to Cowley, Lovell

The towns of Cowley and Lovell are the latest area communities to receive a fiber optic upgrade from local telecommunications provider TCT that will take top level service directly to the doorstep.

Work was scheduled to begin this week in Cowley, with Lovell to follow in a couple months, TCT CEO Richard Wardell said last week.

The company held an open house on Tuesday, March 26, during which TCT customers were invited to come to the office in Lovell and learn about the upgrade.

Wardell noted that the fiber optic upgrade has been ongoing for several years throughout the TCT service area, with each community having various concentrations of fiber available. Ten Sleep was the first community to have a complete fiber-to-the-premises network completed within town limits. Work in Hyattville, a portion of the Hamilton Dome area west of Thermopolis, Burlington and a portion of Deaver followed.

“Some upgrades have taken place in Greybull over the winter as we have prepared to begin construction in Lovell and Cowley this spring,” Wardell said. “Work was done in Byron during the recent street project, which sets the community up for a future upgrade.  TCT strives to coordinate with other development or work projects where we can facilitate installing new fiber facility.”

Wardell explained that the current upgrade involves replacing copper DSL (digital subscriber line) service with fiber optic line, which, though present in the communities, has not been run directly to homes.

All existing TCT customers in Cowley and Lovell will be converted for free, and the company has a map of each community that can be shared to ensure a customer is in the upgrade area. The Cowley map was also printed in the March 28 edition of the Lovell Chronicle.

Call 548-2112 with any questions or to ensure a home is on the upgrade list.

Those who request the upgrade after the current project will face a charge for the fiber upgrade.

A history

TCT has long been pushing the cutting edge of telecommunications technology. Mountain Bell and then US West managed the Lovell area for many years, and in 1995 Tri-County Telephone Association purchased five exchanges from US West: Basin, Greybull, Lovell, Frannie and Meeteetse, and the new company name was changed to TCT West to differentiate it from Tri-County, which was a cooperative, Wardell said.

TCT undertook major upgrades from 1995 to the early 2000s, and Lovell, Byron, Cowley, Deaver and Crooked Creek, Montana, received copper upgrades that, at the time, were the “latest and greatest,” Wardell said, providing top shelf DSL service. But even DSL had its limitations.

“In the world of DSL, it’s an electrical signal, and the laws of physics apply,” Wardell explained. “The greater the distance, the less capacity you have. Back when the territory was purchased, this building (in Lovell) was the central office, and the dial tones (pre-internet) fed from the switch in the back room all the way to the edge of Cowley, the edge of Byron. Everything was served out of here with one switch.

“As part of our upgrade we used a digital carrier system that allowed us to put in a fiber backbone, so we put remote cabinets in Cowley, Byron, several in Lovell and south of Lovell, which shortened the loop. We were able to put fiber from this office to each of those remote cabinets. It was done in the early 2000s.”

Over the years, additional fiber has been added to towns, providing some fiber to the premises. For instance, he said, the Main Street corridor in Lovell has fiber, and TCT was able to also add fiber south of town. As areas with copper wire “needed a refresh,” Wardell said, it was done with fiber.

Lovell’s upgrade came at the end of the DSL era, and had the system been upgraded just a few years later, the community would have had fiber earlier, Wardell said, adding, “We replaced it with the best that existed at the time. It’s now Lovell’s turn to get that replacement where all of the copper in town will be replaced.”

Over the years, redundancy was built into the system via two rings of main lines, one in the north of the service area and one in the south so if a line was cut, service would continue.

About 10 percent of customers in Lovell already have fiber optic service, Wardell said, such as schools, the hospital and other “anchor institutions,” along with some areas of town. Now, anything not already fiber will receive the upgrade, Wardell said.

“We have been working consistently over the years to improve services wherever possible,” he said. “When you look at our service footprint, it’s a large footprint. We really have tried to make improvements to the areas that have the worst service, if possible, first.”

Federal and state grant programs have put an emphasis on people who are unserved or underserved by broadband/fiber systems, and Lovell wasn’t considered to be unserved or underserved with the speeds available meeting the guidelines of being “fully served.” With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, 25 Mbps (download) by 3 Mbps (upload) service as the definition of served or unserved was changed to 100 Mbps x 20 Mbps.

“You can no longer adequately achieve the 100 x 20 rate with DSL, which requires a forklift upgrade, if you will, in changing out all of the connections between the alley and the house,” Wardell explained. “A lot of the alleys have had fiber. We just haven’t been able to take it to the house in a mass way.”

In 2020, TCT applied for and was accepted for a CARES Connect Wyoming grant, which allowed the company to greatly improve service out of town south of Lovell, in Cowley, between Deaver and Powell, Shell, rural Greybull, Manderson and Burlington/Otto, also adding towers to expand wireless service to areas that didn’t have DSL or fiber. Those project areas qualified by having less than 25X3 Mbps speeds.

“That was about a $10 million project in 2020,” Wardell said. “TCT has been working with our own dollars to make these expansions, and the projects we’re doing today are part of the Connect Wyoming Project that is administered by the Wyoming Business Council, and they got money through the ARPA capital facilities grant. It was a competitive grant, and we made six applications and were successful with five of them. Just over 25 percent of the grants were funded, so we were pretty fortunate in the Big Horn Basin to have Lovell, Cowley and Meeteetse as far as areas in our service territory (for an upgrade) that had copper. It’s a matching grant, but we were able to get some assistance with making our dollars go further for these projects.”

Current project

The contractor was mobilizing and awaiting the delivery of materials last week to begin work in Cowley this week, Wardell said, with a pre-construction meeting held Thursday night.

“Basically, we’re kicking off in Cowley, then will move to Lovell,” Wardell noted, adding, “The project entails placing conduit in the streets, placing hand holes that are basically small vaults like a lawn vault for a sprinkler system where we can place multiple cables, one coming in, one coming out – and a subscriber drop from the house back to the alley or the street, where we splice them together.

“The conduit goes in first, hand holes are placed, and we come back and put the fiber in the conduit. Then we splice it at the side of the house in a fiber splice enclosure that will be mounted and replace the existing network interface device on the side of your house. On the inside of the house there will be an optical network terminal (ONT) that terminates the fiber.”

Wardell said approximately 1,054 homes in Lovell and 309 in Cowley will receive the upgraded service, with projects to follow later in Meeteetse, rural Powell and Road 2AB near Cody.

“Wherever today is a copper pedestal, there’s going to be paralleling fiber and a hand hole, as a general rule,” he said. “There has to be a physical connection between every house back to the electronics, whether this building or the several cabinets we have scattered through town. It’s really a one for one replacement of what’s in the ground today.

“By mid-summer Lovell will be bustling with activity with construction toward the end of the summer.”

Wardell said he hopes all residents will participate in the project.

“Any service (phone, internet or TV) that TCT provides today will be moved over to fiber, and at the end of the project the copper facility in town will be deprecated,” he said. “TCT will schedule with customers to move their services as to not disrupt existing services. TCT hopes all property owners will allow us to install the fiber facility from the street or alley to the side of the building so that future services can be installed and we can leverage this project to future-proof Lovell and Cowley. There will be no charges to the customer for this work at this time. 

“TCT has provided a web page where addresses can be verified to make sure they are on the list, or they can call into the office to coordinate any work that will need to be done. Prior to work beginning, TCT will be sending representatives out to discuss the project with landowners to make plans for the work.”

Upgrade effect

TCT provides service for telephone, internet and television, and Wardell said the telephone service will essentially remain the same.

“Telephone service hasn’t changed a lot,” he said. “We’ve had a very feature rich option for telephone with all of the features that were brought about back in ’95 like voicemail, caller ID and call waiting and forwarding. So those features really haven’t changed a lot.”

Wardell said the biggest improvement in what TCT can deliver is the tremendous upgrade in internet service, which has grown from a maximum of 100-megabit capacity with DSL to multi-gigabit service.

As for television, there have been changes in the company streaming platform that allows a customer to put the streaming service onto devices like Roku and Firestick in the home or on a smartphone, giving a customer more accessibility to TV, and the greater internet capacity increases access to other services like Hulu or Netflix.

“The new technology falls in line with the latest trends,” Wardell said.

Customers are encouraged to take advantage of the new service offerings and the features it provides. There will be a set-top box service that will be available for those who have specific needs.