I recently listened to an interview with Randy Klindt, General Manager of Co-Mo Connect, a rural electric co-op building a gigabit fiber network in Central Missouri. It reminded me that the nation’s rural electric co-operatives can be effective vehicles for deploying advanced communication infrastructure in relatively high-cost and underserved rural areas. Like most electric co-ops, Co-Mo serves a very rural area. Its service area spans 2,300 square miles and includes roughly 31,000 electric meters. That’s only about 13.5 meters per square mile. As Klindt points out, member owned co-ops like Co-Mo have a different perspective than private companies when it […]