Empower Broadband, a spinoff of Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative (MEC), says it recently passed the 10,000 subscriber milestone and is making major inroads on bringing affordable fiber Internet access to unserved regions of Mecklenburg, Halifax, Charlotte, and Brunswick counties in Southern Virginia.
Empower and MEC representatives welcomed state and local officials and state agency leaders for a celebration ceremony last month in South Boston, where MEC and EMPOWER board of directors President David J. Jones said the 3,000 miles of freshly deployed fiber was “the largest construction initiative this cooperative has ever undertaken.”
Like countless other U.S. electric cooperatives, MEC, created back in 1938, is leveraging generations of experience at rural electrification to extend fiber into rural markets long neglected by regional private telecom monopolies.
“Knowing that our communities desperately needed a high-speed backbone, the board asked the same question that our founders had — if we don’t do it, who will?” Jones told attendees.
The $154 million network deployment was financed in part through the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative (VATI), which provided a $69.4 million grant in late 2021 to the Southside Planning District Commission and Empower.
MEC and Empower also received a $449,381 grant in May of 2021 to construct 22 miles of fiber and connect 414 units in the Tanglewood Shores area of Bracey, and another $3.35 million grant in 2024 to extend fiber access to an additional 3,983 addresses in Mecklenburg, Halifax, and Brunswick.
“This is the kind of investment that strengthens our community for today while laying the groundwork for tomorrow,” Delegate Otto Wachsmann said of the expansions.
The lion’s share of Virginia's investment in rural fiber optics came courtesy of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). Virginia’s efforts through VATI reduced the total number of unserved Virginia homes by 200,000 in just a few years – doubling the amount of expanded access of any other state during this time period, Virginia Broadband Office Director Chandler Vaughan recently told local news outlet SovaNow.
Empower currently offers locals four tiers of fiber service: a symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month; a symmetrical 250 Mbps option for $90 a month; a symmetrical 500 Mbps tier for $110 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) option for $130 a month.
Longtime locals, like Tammy Mulchi of Clarksville, told SovaNow that a former state senator informed her in 2003 that she’d never see broadband access at her rural home in the “middle of nowhere.”
“Boy, was he wrong,” she said.
Inline image of Empower Broadband service trucks in the field courtesy of Empower Broadband Facebook page
