How a small Kentucky town was 10 years ahead of the government

This story originally aired on “Marketplace” on Aug. 28.

Congress has authorized trillions of dollars in new spending through the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In the series “Breaking Ground,” “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal is visiting communities across the country to look at how this infusion of federal dollars might change the economy — in complicated, invisible, even contradictory ways. 

In this third and final episode of our broadband coverage, Ryssdal visits the town of McKee, Kentucky, which has had every home and business connected to fiber internet since 2014 — 10 years ahead of what the federal government is trying to accomplish with the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program today. 

Click the audio player above to hear the story. 

The town of McKee, Kentucky, population 800, was ahead of the curve. 

The federal government is currently implementing the $42.45 billion BEAD Program, with the goal of connecting every home to high-speed internet by 2030. In McKee, the nonprofit Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative already did that — a decade ago. 

“We were originally created to serve two very rural, very poor counties in eastern Kentucky,” said Keith Gabbard, CEO of PRTC. 

PRTC has about 55 employees and is based in Jackson County, where McKee is the county seat. According to 2022 Census data, the median household income in McKee is around $18,000 — less than a third of what it is for the state of Kentucky as a whole. 

When it was created in the 1950s, the co-op only did telephone services, but now it also does TV and internet. First, PRTC connected its two counties to dial-up internet, then DSL. 

“We were constantly having to try to rebuild and upgrade because DSL just wasn’t getting the speeds that people wanted,” Gabbard said. “And then in 2008, we’d heard a little bit about fiber to the home, and we thought, we’re going to borrow.” 

PRTC borrowed $45 million from the federal government — in part from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Great Recession-era stimulus bill. The company also put in $5 million of its own money to connect its two counties for a total of $50 million. The project was completed in 2014. 

“We were one of the first in Kentucky for sure,” Gabbard said about the fiber internet. “And one of the first in the country.” 

The terrain in Jackson County makes installing fiber, which is typically buried in the ground, particularly difficult and expensive. A fourth of the county is within the Daniel Boone National Forest — representative of the area’s Appalachian topography.

“We have a lot of mountains, a lot of rock, and we were not able to bury our cable, most of it is aerial,” Gabbard said. “There are a lot more trees than there are people and homes.” 

The combined population of the two counties PRTC connected, Jackson and Owsley, is about 18,000 people, who often live far apart in the rural area. This means the cost of connecting each home was particularly high, but Gabbard said PRTC benefited from being a nonprofit. 

“If we can break even, and in the long run provide the services our people need, that’s what we’re about,” Gabbard said. 

Now, PRTC is expanding its fiber internet coverage into other nearby counties. The company will likely apply for a slice of Kentucky’s $1.1 billion slice of the BEAD funding to complete these builds, and Gabbard anticipates PRTC will need to hire more too. 

Matt Bingham, install repair tech supervisor, currently oversees a team of about 20 people who do fiber installations and troubleshooting. He’s been at PRTC since 2011, and like Gabbard, was born and raised in Jackson County. 

“I went to the county school and had all intentions of going to college,” Bingham said. “I was probably a junior in high school when I really got thinking about it seriously, and I really didn’t want to go through four, six, eight more years of school. So, I started thinking about, 'what can I do and stay in the county?'” 

Bingham was originally working with copper to do internet installations, and then he was part of the team that then got the counties connected to fiber. 

“From there to where we are now, it’s not even remotely the same,” Bingham said. “But learning to do it wasn’t that hard. It’s unreal in how it works and what it does. When you think about information going across a piece of glass the size of a hair, it don’t even seem real.” 

Since Jackson County got connected to fiber in 2014, Bingham has seen the changes it’s brought to his hometown. 

“When I was in high school and dating my wife, as I drove up the road, I could have told you every house, everybody’s name,” Bingham said. “Now it’s, they’re from Texas or Wyoming or Oregon. When I was doing installs, and I had a customer that I knew was from somewhere else, I’d ask them, 'how’d you hear about Jackson County?' And they said, I’d seen it online, and it was all of them.” 

The “Marketplace” team spoke with several people who moved to Jackson County from other states or cities in Kentucky because of the broadband — the ability to work remotely and also have a rural lifestyle. In addition to the people moving to town, Gabbard noted how the broadband has helped access to education and healthcare. 

“I was taught early in life to try and give back to your community,” Gabbard said, noting that his father became mayor of McKee after he retired. “I know that this company is not the one thing that makes everything wonderful here, but we play a role. And the last 10 to 20 years, we’ve played a bigger role.” 

Gabbard has been working at PRTC for nearly 50 years. He started at the company in 1976, answering the phones.