North Central Telephone Cooperative Corporation (NCTC) Central Office Technician Eddie Blankenship installs a fiber optic jumper cable at the Data Center, in Lafayette, Tennessee, on Sept 27, 2018.
The Data Center houses the telephone soft switch for NCTC customers and offers North Central Cloud Solutions. Through the Cloud, North Central offers virtualized computing and networking services including off-site data back-up, hosted servers, disaster recovery, and secure data storage. Co-located with the Network Operations Center (NOC), where technicians monitor IPTV channels, entire IP network, fiber access transport, interior and exterior of the Data Center Annex, soft switch, and cloud.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS) administers programs that provide much-needed infrastructure or infrastructure improvements to rural communities. These include water and waste treatment, electric power and telecommunications services. All of these services play a critical role in helping to expand economic opportunities and improve the quality of life for rural residents.
The cooperative is a full-service provider, providing voice, video, data, broadband, home security, cloud services and data center solutions.
Because of the lower customer density in rural regions such as this NCTC has been an active borrower with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS) since 1951 to provide service to subscribers in Tennessee and Kentucky, that rival companies in metropolitan areas.
Over the past 10 years, NCTC has received funds in the form of $101,782,663M in loans and $25,930,868M in grants.
The companyâs most recent loan, which was obligated in 2017, will be used to make system improvements in 5 of North Central's 10 exchanges (Green Grove, Hillsdale, Red Boiling Springs, Scottville, and Lafayette). This will complete their fiber to the premises network throughout their territory. This project is currently in the âconstructionâ phase.
In February of 2008 tornados destroyed much of the area and took many lives, NCTC began working to build a safe, tier II+ facility that is EF-5 Tornado resistant with SSAE16 security validation. The data center houses the telephone soft switch for NCTC customers and offers North Central Cloud Solutions. Through the Cloud, North Central offers virtualized computing and networking services including off-site data back-up, hosted servers, disaster recovery, and secure data storage.
USDA Photo by Lance Cheung. Original public domain image from Flickr