Gibson Connect's Rural Cooperative Model - Episode 658 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm a little bit a little bit rusty. It's been it's been a little while Scott since I did an interview but I'm here today with Scott Goff who is a marketing coordinator at Gibson Connect in Tennessee. Welcome to the show.

Scott Goff (00:37)
Thanks, it's great to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:38)
I'm excited to talk to you. Gibson Connect has been doing some really cool things down there in Tennessee. You're a subsidiary of Gibson Electric, which has ⁓ more than 90 years of, or sorry, approaching 90 years of experience as an electric membership corporation, I think is what the EMC stands for typically, but many think of just rural electric co-ops. So I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about...

Gibson Electric and and how it got into the the fiber game for actual broadband service to the home

Scott Goff (01:08)
Yeah. So like you said, we're, we're a rural ⁓ provider. You know, we started back in 2017 and we really got into it for our, for our members. So we, live in an area and we serve an area that is, or has historically been unserved or underserved pretty significantly. So I've been here for about two years and when I first started, you know, they were showing me around and they were saying, you know, Hey, in this area, like no one's ever had broadband in the, some of these areas. and,

before we got there. Really their only option was whatever they could get on their phone, which being way out there isn't much, or satellite Internet, which is basically DSL. And so once we could start serving people, that's when we really jumped in to serve those folks and to serve our electric members.

Christopher Mitchell (01:48)
One of the things I saw that was interesting is what I often expect when I look into this, which ⁓ it suggested that roughly half of your members fit that description where they had no option. But among those that did have high speed Internet access options, they weren't always super happy with it. They were looking for, I think, something that ⁓ was a little bit closer to home and something that gave them some different options, I guess.

Scott Goff (02:13)
Yeah. And we, we hear that quite a bit. You know, I mean, we, we do have competition from, in a few areas, we've got some competition from a local provider or regional provider. You know, we've got a couple of national providers in our area as well. but yeah, I mean, people appreciate having a local provider, someone where like our whole support team is based right here in Trenton, Tennessee, like where our corporate headquarters is. but I think more than that, you know, that kind of

mentality that culture or you know, whatever you want to call it of being a co-op is really deeply ingrained because we you know, our parent company is the electric cooperative It's really deeply ingrained in how we operate and how we think And so providing Internet that really makes people's life better providing Internet that's super reliable It's a hundred percent fiber. And so, you know, it's it's nice and fast. It's super reliable. We work hard to keep it up

And I think honestly more than it us being local The fact that the Internet doesn't go out all the time You know the fact that we'll go out and make it right, you know if we need to And we don't you know, we don't do contracts. We don't do that hey, you can get a temporary deal and then you're six months from now. It's double what it used to be and now you're you know We don't kind of you know all that stuff. I think that really factors in as much or more than

us being a local provider.

Christopher Mitchell (03:28)
Yeah, for reliability, I'm always curious. I didn't prep you on this. Maybe you probably have it on the back of your head. do know if you're mostly using the poles that you use for electric, or did you go underground for substantial parts of it? How did you end up in terms of aerial versus buried?

Scott Goff (03:43)
We pretty much follow what the electric lines do. if the electric lines are up on a pole, we go up on a pole. If they're underground, we go underground. So it's a pretty simple decision-making process. And for the most part, it's not 100%. It's not every single time, but the vast majority of the time, that's what we do.

Christopher Mitchell (03:50)
Mm-hmm.

Sure, and then I am curious, is this something where the utility was using fiber internally for like, I mean, I hear a lot of places, they started doing it in the 90s, and then they, like you said, you didn't have authorization from the state to offer it to residents until more recently, but presumably you've had fiber operations for a long time for substations and things like that.

Scott Goff (04:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So if we go back before 2017, we started doing fiber to interconnect all of our substations and then people would have, Hey, can I get on that? Hey, can I get on that? And so, yeah, yeah. And so we had this pretty robust fiber ring built out, you know, again, in as part of serving our members to make sure that we could monitor our substations better. and then we, we kind of piggybacked off of that to start providing residential and business.

Christopher Mitchell (04:28)
Right. Just slip me on. No one will notice.

Scott Goff (04:45)
⁓ And now we kind of do a little bit of everything, you know, we do residential, small business, big business, dark fiber leasing. you know, some of the stuff the guys are talking about, I'm like, I don't understand how half of that works, but that's cool that we're doing it, you know. So yeah, it's become a really good way to serve our community and to serve our members and our subscribers.

Christopher Mitchell (05:08)
I saw that you successfully won an auction for the Connect America Fund round two back in the day. And I'm curious, I know that when you have the kind of rural territory that you have, it's very costly to get out to everyone. You need some government support for that. Have you been able to get to most of your members, all of your members? Where are you with that?

Scott Goff (05:27)
Yes, we, and again, so Tennessee regulations are a little unique. So we have a carve out in some of our areas where we can't serve our electric members because of those rules. But everybody we can serve in our electric footprint we've built out to. And so that the big bulk of it is done. You know, we've got some areas where we've expanded.

up in Kentucky and I say up in Kentucky, we are in far or some people here say extreme far Western Kentucky. You know, it's sort of just that end, that little bit on the end there. and so we've been able to expand in a few places because of grants and funding like that so that we can, you know, support those areas. But, ⁓ you know, by and large, our focus is on that main electric footprint and where we can serve inside of there. And yeah, we've got everybody, everybody's house is able to be hooked up. so.

give us a call.

Christopher Mitchell (06:11)
When I saw that a lot of people had signed up, you have, like you said, there's areas that are off limits per state law that you are not permitted to serve. It looked like you had about 39,000 members and having more than 20,000 people signed up at the beginning of this year, that certainly seems like a successful launch and approach.

Scott Goff (06:30)
Yeah, and honestly, it's, mean, I couldn't take credit for it on the marketing side, even if I wanted to. know, really what that comes down to is 80 plus years, almost 90 years of faithful service by the electric cooperative to build that deep level of trust in our communities with our folks. And then our, I mean, everybody here from operations to tech support and,

customer service, member service. I mean, they've all worked really hard to provide an incredibly high level of service to our folks. And really that's where you see that come from. I've worked at several different places before. I've never worked at a place where customers and people in the community, almost to a person, are very happy with what we're doing and very happy with us. And it's been really great because now we're just...

We just keep building and try to do a little bit better every day, build on our successes. And yeah, it's been successful, but again, as much as I would love to take credit for it and say it was my amazing marketing, it was really just a lot of hard work from a lot of people here.

Christopher Mitchell (07:31)
You know, it's funny because I remember talking to someone who is marketing in a similar situation with a different network, but that was beloved by the community. And they were saying at a certain point, you're not even really trying to market necessarily to get more subscribers. It's marketing to continue that loyalty and to make sure that people just think very fondly of you.

because you sort of you become so successful there's not that many new subscribers you could get I mean I'm sure you're still growing but you'll be running into that problem at some point here

Scott Goff (08:00)
Yeah, and it's funny you bring that up because we are starting to shift gears into from like building and rapid growth into obviously we still want to grow, but really we're starting to shift gears into how do we make sure that we retain the subscribers that we have, improve their experience, improve their level of service, know, make sure everybody stays happy with what they've got, you know, because we're

we are starting to reach kind of the upper limits of what we can, as far as a take rate goes, of what we can do.

Christopher Mitchell (08:29)
Right, yeah, because I know that you divided into zones and those early zones have got to be pretty saturated. Yeah, so I'm curious, one of the things that, well, I'll say it for people that are interested. We're gonna talk a little bit about a specific Calix service that you use, vendor that you use. I've talked about Calix a lot before. But first, I always want to ask you, is there an anecdote that stands out to you when you think about...

why what you're doing is meaningful. You get up in the morning and you're like, I really helping people out? What has the network done that's improved lives in the region?

Scott Goff (09:02)
Yeah, so I've got two, and they're like, I love telling these stories. So the first one is, like I said, I've been here for about two years and like when I first started, they did an amazing job of kind of helping me understand the company and where we operate. And, know, again, being a city boy, like kind of understanding what rural life and rural Internet looks like. ⁓ And so we were out in an area up in Kentucky, one of the outside fiber guys, and he was showing me, you know,

Christopher Mitchell (09:19)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Goff (09:25)
folks out here have never had broadband before and here's how we hook them up and go through cornfields and gullies and all that. and he was telling me, he said, you know, some of these folks have only had Internet with us for three or four months, but when their power goes out, they're calling tech support and asking when the Wi-Fi is going to be back on. And you know, he's like, hang on, you, you haven't had, know, and it's, love it because it's, it's clearly just become another utility, right? And it's become such so quickly it's, it's become such a core part of their life that, you know, they're going to, okay.

Christopher Mitchell (09:39)
Hahaha.

Scott Goff (09:52)
When's the water coming back on? When's the electricity coming back on? When's my Wi-Fi coming back on? Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (09:56)
Right, and not in that order. I like you said, I've heard this

before with some of the fires out in Washington state. I've heard some of the public utility districts out there reporting the same thing where they're telling people, gee, you know, like we lost so many lines of poles that it's going to be a couple of weeks. And they're like, what about the Internet? It's like, well, it goes in the same poles

Scott Goff (10:14)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's hard to get you Wi-Fi if we don't have power. Um, yeah. And so that to me, I was just great. You know, you see that people are really loving the service and it makes you feel good. think the other one is, um, so I come out of, this is my first broadband job. I came out of higher ed and, a little less positivity in higher ed on social media, um, which is fine. This is part of it, but I got here, you know, people were talking about how like, you know, we get complaints all the time on our Facebook page and you know,

Christopher Mitchell (10:21)
Right.

Right.

Scott Goff (10:46)
And I was like, all right. So I started to look into it to figure out what's going on. And I would say at, when I first started and still today, our number one complaint on Facebook is why can't you come down to my house? Why can't we, why can't we get your service? I can see, you know, we, we have people all the time. I can see the fiber line on the pole. What, know, can you just 500 feet? I'm right here. I'm right, you know, and we have to go into the whole, you know, state regulations. We'd love to serve you all that stuff. But, um,

Christopher Mitchell (10:56)
Right.

Scott Goff (11:12)
And again, to me, just shows we're doing a really good job of serving our subscribers and serving our members when the biggest complaint we have is, I want your service, why can't I have it?

Christopher Mitchell (11:22)
Right. Well, and I'll say that. I mean, I think often if you're working for a co-op in this situation, it's difficult to necessarily tell people to be political. But people need to let their elected officials know that that's an issue. And then elected officials can decide whether or not they want to wrestle with it. But if they don't hear about it, you know, if the utility is the only one hearing the complaint, that's going to be an issue. So I always encourage people. There will be some people who I'm sure dig into this because they're trying to figure out how to get you to connect them.

And they should talk to their elected officials about making sure the law is appropriate. ⁓

Scott Goff (11:56)
Yeah. And that's up

to them. You know, we just sort of let them know like, here's why. And, ⁓ just sort of leave it up to them if they want to do something about that. You know, we have had some people that have like, I've called the Mayor I've called the city council people, like, you know, I, you know, I've gone in and done the leg work. Like they're just, they're ready to meet with you now. You know, I'm going, okay, thank you.

Christopher Mitchell (12:12)
Right. Yeah.

And the problem is, I know that you have some bigger relationships at times where, you know, there's a there's a real challenge. And I suspect that the state law at stake here is one that is making sure that the the telephone co-ops have their area. We have a historic policy problem of having areas that we kind of had sectioned off for good reason. And we need to make sure that we don't suddenly change the economics in a way that puts an entire network at risk.

So ⁓ we need the policymakers to be making hard decisions, but also I think recognizing that there might need to be additional changes in coming years and we should roll it out over time. But that's above, I think, your pay grade and I don't know enough about it to really shoot my mouth off any more than that. So I don't want to get you in trouble.

Scott Goff (12:57)
Yeah, I was about to say, think, no, no,

I was about to say, you know, I think, um, of course we're happy to, you know, we can work inside of any, any regulations or any boxes that are drawn, but I'm definitely, um, I'm not informed enough and definitely not smart enough to make any sort of recommendations for what people should do. I just sort of pass along what I know.

Christopher Mitchell (13:15)
Ha ha.

Right. So I wanted to then dig in. I don't know for people who are listening, I have a tremendous fondness for Calix. I'm a fan of a lot of the vendors. I just happened to be in Minnesota where Optical Solutions had been purchased by Calix. I know a lot of the people. And I just this week was out at

Calix's Plymouth their big location there, because they're big supporters of our tribal broadband bootcamp. So I've used the E7 platform, but I'm still learning about different services that they offer. This is something we're trying to dig into a little bit on the show to get a better sense of what goes into modern ISPs. And so I have never even heard of Calix Engagement Cloud, but you use it. And I think that there's probably...

you know, similar tools out there for others, but I want to get a sense of what Calix is doing for you with this engagement cloud business.

Scott Goff (14:06)
Yeah, and it's super helpful. We use it all the time. I would say probably in the last eight to 10 months, we've really kind of put the pedal down, put the pedal to the metal and really using it more and more. And now we're starting to use feedback that we got from previous campaigns into our new campaigns. know, we've got actually a one Gig upgrade campaign that's going to launch next week.

And we're taking stuff that we've learned from using Engagement Cloud before, we're taking Engagement Cloud data, combining it with some of our Google Analytics information, and we're sort of rolling that all up together. this sounds like I'm some amazing marketer. We're still trying to figure out all this and how to really use it to the best of its ability. But it's been great to leverage a tool like that and to have so much good data.

So just to cut a quick overview, what we have access to through that is how our subscribers use the network. You know, are they...

Christopher Mitchell (14:58)
Which

is, sorry, I just wanna make sure it's very clear. I think you're talking more about sort of like how often they use it and what general types of services. You're not talking about like, they've watched this video on Netflix or something like that.

Scott Goff (15:10)
No, no, no, yes, yes, just to be clear,

it's more of like general network usage, so, you know, like our tech support team, if someone calls in and they're having issues, they can see, hey, look, it looks like you've got, we can't really tell what it is, but it looks like you've got something on the edge of your network that's just out of range. Is that the TV you're talking about? Okay, you probably need an extender or something like that. Or one of my supervisors,

was trying to figure out why his Internet was getting bogged down and they have a little app that has all that information that you can see for your own network. Turns out he had a ⁓ Wi-Fi DVD player that because the Wi-Fi...

What do call it? The Wi-Fi on there was fairly bad. You know, it was the network was going, okay, we got to go down to the lowest common denominator. And so now everybody's using 10 year old Wi-Fi quality, you know, and so he's like, okay, I guess I should turn that off. It's that sort of stuff. No, we can't see. We can't see and we don't want to see specifics on exactly where you're going and what you're doing and all that sort of stuff. But we don't get any of that for for engagement cloud. It's really just that.

Christopher Mitchell (15:54)
All right, yeah.

Scott Goff (16:09)
hey, we've got folks that are kind of doing gaming related stuff. They have PlayStations or whatever. Or they're, you know, all that. So we can look at that and we can use that and sort of say, hey, you if we're doing a promotion around, let's say work from home or gamers or stuff like that, we can use some of that information to figure out who's really a good candidate for an email or a postcard.

Christopher Mitchell (16:32)
Yeah, I think some of this, I mean, I don't know. I don't know how long this has been in the works. But I know that Calix, well, Optical Solutions and then Calix, was huge in the Dakotas, and within North Dakota in particular, when they were building out. And ⁓ that was the first place that I heard of these stories from some of the marketers up there. And I can't remember who it was.

But one of the co-ops had made it a practice of every December, they would reach out to the subscribers and say, hey, for the season, for the holiday over Christmas, we're going to be boosting you to the next level. And then people would sort of go at that point, maybe from like 10 megabits to 15 or 15 to 30 or something like that to the next plan.

Scott Goff (17:13)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (17:13)
And then in January, they would say, hey, the promotion's over. But if you got used to those higher speeds, here's what it would take to continue to have that level of performance. And I know that there was great relationships before. And so I wonder, is that a part of the engagement cloud to make that easier?

Scott Goff (17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'll give prime example is what we're rolling out next week. So we tried to figure out who would be a good candidate for upgrading. So we have two services. are two residential tiers. We do 250 and one Gig. And so we wanted to see, which one of our, or what group of our 250 customers would be potentially good candidates for Gig service for this promotion. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (17:50)
Right, mean, sorry to interrupt, but I imagine

you could tell the difference between someone who's gaming all day long or just using the network and saturating, not saturating 250 likely, but regularly pushing their limits versus someone who's checking their email once a day.

Scott Goff (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and that sort of goes into it and we can see, and again, can't, on the marketing side of things with Engagement Cloud, I can't see what you have hooked up to your network, but I can see, there's a group of people who have at least 10 devices on their network. And you're on the 250 plan, you got 10, 15, 20 devices. Probably, that's one of the factors of that. Are you using your data, a lot of data? Again, I can't see exactly what you're doing, I just know that you're using a lot of it. So we're gonna put you in that category.

Christopher Mitchell (18:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Scott Goff (18:33)
And then, you know, then we can send that off and we can send them, we're going to send them postcards and emails and stuff. I will say one of the things about kind of going back to how we use data as part of, you know, just part of being a co-op, we have a really strong kind of customer focused privacy policy. And so that there's a lot of limitations on what, even if I could see the data, there's limitations on what I can do with it. Because we know

It's best for our subscribers. It's best for our members. If we protect their data, we protect their personal identifiable information. And so, you know, even as we talk through all this, there's, there's a lot of this too, where I've talked to our network guys who wrote that policy and I'm like, Hey, can I do this? And they go, no, you can't do that. Okay. And so just sort of as, you know, that's a reality for us, but also, you know, just if you're in a, for folks that may either be in a similar situation to us where they do have strong.

you know, customer focused privacy policies or they don't necessarily have access to all this data. You can still do a lot of good campaigns. You can still do a, you can still drive a lot of business results even without having all the super granular detail that you, you know, that you may want to have.

Christopher Mitchell (19:37)
Yeah, sometimes I think people get distracted by too much detail. You got to figure out what's the relevant detail.

Scott Goff (19:43)
yeah, and you can easily, and I have, we over-engineered a campaign earlier in the year and we saw zero results. You like, okay, think we maybe, I say we, I went a little overboard on the, you know, the targeting.

Christopher Mitchell (19:56)
Yeah. So I'm curious and the last question I had for you is in terms of electric co-ops. mean, you here we are. Traditionally, we talk about marketing as being one of the hardest things for co-ops to do. because you have 90 years of experience typically of not marketing, right, effectively, because you have a monopoly service territory for something that people desperately need.

Scott Goff (20:14)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (20:19)
Now you're in an area where a substantial number of people have choices. so Internet access has some similarities. I feel like, Mark Twain says, it rhymes with the past. It's not necessarily replicating it. But I'm curious. We see, I think there's more than 700 electric co-ops and I think more than 250, 300-ish.

Scott Goff (20:35)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (20:43)
maybe are as aggressive in terms of trying to get out to all their customers with fiber. From the two years you've spent in the field there, what do you see that in terms of explains, that explains why we don't see more of the electric co-ops digging into this?

Scott Goff (20:56)
That's a really good question. think, first and foremost, think our decision to get into this was really a decision based on what's going to serve our members well. And so I've got to imagine that for the majority of them, they've looked into it and that's part of the decision process. I mean, it's part of the decision process for all co-ops. Is this good for the member? That's a lot of our decision-making process, even, I mean...

you know, not just what campaigns are we going to run, what products are we going to offer, but how, you know, we mentioned a little bit earlier about with data stuff, but even beyond that, like how are we going to do these campaigns? Is the way that we're doing them, you know, good for the member or is it something we need to avoid? And so, you know, I think that's part of a big part of it. You know, also, I mean, it's a, it's a big undertaking. You know, I've seen how hard our folks have worked for, for, for years to build this out.

Serve these folks well, you know and and to try to find that balance, know, like you mentioned the sales thing Being in a co-op kind of cuts both ways, you know It provides Incredible branding incredible trust with your customers or with your members and your subscribers But on the other side, you know, it's a little harder for us to sell stuff because it's just not part of our DNA

And anything that feels salesy, you know, is kind of, you know, I don't know if we want to do that. so for us, when it comes to selling, we really try to do it less like selling and more of advising or just giving them information and letting them know, Hey, you know, we think this would be a good fit for you. You know, and, so I think that's, mean, there's, there's probably a lot that goes into it. I'm just from our perspective on, or from our experience on that, you know, I can see.

It's a lot of work. It's a very different business. You know, and you got to start with what's good for your membership first. And you know, if your membership either votes and says we don't want that, or we don't want you guys to do that, or if they determine, you know, internally that hey, it's just not going to be a good return for the members and it's just not going to be a good fit. And that's okay.

Christopher Mitchell (22:45)
Yeah, I'm reminded that, and I'm curious if you heard any of these kind of horror stories, but for people who are wondering why some electric co-ops have decided not to do it, you have to remember that some of these got involved with propane. Some of them got involved with satellite contracts and trying to get people services decades ago that didn't go well. And it's not always easy to tell what is the thing that is a multi-decade investment.

Because a lot of things might appear to be that but changing technology may shift it So I happen to believe that this is very different from getting involved with a propane or something like that But I can understand that people who have been there and had to make those hard calls with whatever information was available at the time You know feel pretty nervous about jumping into something else

Scott Goff (23:29)
yeah. And on a much smaller scale, mean, we even see that in just little things like, I wanted to offer a, you know, I thought when I first started, that would be great if we offered some sort of like tech, tech or device insurance thing, you know, I was like, this would be cool. We could do it through a third party. And they were like, listen, let me tell you what happened when we did something similar to this on the electric side years ago. ⁓ and it was, you know, cause

Christopher Mitchell (23:43)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Scott Goff (23:53)
part of being at a co-op is, you if, if I sell you something, you're going to call us, you know, and it, or if you bought a TV that connects to the Internet, even if you, cause you didn't buy it from us, you're still going to call us and go, why isn't my TV working? Can you help me figure it out? Why is this printer working? It connects to something that connects the Internet. and so we, we even in those conversations, we go, okay. So that's not something we can do because we know that we can't really serve it.

or service it and that's what people are going to want us to do. yeah, I can't, and again, that's like I say, way, way smaller scale. So yeah, I can't imagine trying to be at that larger scale trying to decide, okay, is this something that we really hang our hat on and go into for 20, 30 years or is this something that we need to let go?

Christopher Mitchell (24:37)
Yeah. No, I really appreciate your time today and your insights on everything from the specifics to Gibson Connect to some of the factors that go into the decision making around where to build the network and what products to offer and things like that. And ⁓ I'll just wrap up by saying we didn't record the part, but I wish you luck as the MLS playoffs approach with Nashville.

and the start of a new season with Liverpool.

Scott Goff (25:02)
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate

it. Thanks for having us on. It's great to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (25:07)
Excellent.

Ry Marcattilio (25:09):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available @communitynetworks.org/broadbandbits. Email us at podcast@communitynetworks.org with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on BlueSky: his handles @SportsShotChris. [00:39:00] Follow Community Networks stories on BlueSky: the handles @communitynets. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. Catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Hesby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons.