High-speed internet and telephone service for West Texas - ETI
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October 30, 2022

High-speed internet and telephone service for West Texas

The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.

Joe Coldebella:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Joe Coldebella, your host for this episode. Joining me is Patrick Sherrill, the general manager for Poka Lambro Cooperative located in West Texas. Patrick, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.

Patrick Sherrill:

Hey, Joe. Thanks. Good to be with you this morning.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome. So really excited to share your story about Poka Lambro. Before we do that, I would love it if you could give the folks a little bit about your backstory, and your broadband journey.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. So I moved to Lubbock, Texas in, let’s see, 1995 to go to graduate school at Texas Tech, and I got a job working at an engineering firm that happened to specialize in building rural telephone networks. So, 1995, the internet was barely a thing, and broadband really wasn’t a thing. Everything was dial-up. So we were focused on telephone networks in rural areas. It was just my job working my way through graduate school, but what a lucky break for me to end up in this industry, be there before broadband really started, and get to be a part of that. I look back at that, and I think I’m so fortunate. Little interesting side story about that engagement. The first project that I ever worked on at the engineering firm was Poka Lambro. So I didn’t come back around to Poka Lambro for another 25-ish years, but funny that that’s where my career started.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s crazy.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was something that was a fun story to tell when I was interviewing for this job. So with the engineering firm, I finished graduate school. They offered me a position. I said, “Yes, I’ll hang out here.” That eventually moved me out west to Arizona. One of the clients that I was working with in Arizona needed a manager, so they offered me the position. That’s when I moved over to the operation side. I guess that would have been 2006. It was a small company serving a rural area on the fringes of Metro Phoenix and had to figure out how to grow really fast, so I jumped in there. Back in 2006, we were building fiber-to-the-home networks and figuring out how to position ourselves competitively and offer a good broadband product.

So I cut my teeth doing that and did that for, gosh, I think 14 years, and like any good Texan, it was time to come back home. So I started looking for opportunities to come back, and the Poka Lambro position came open. I was lucky enough to get the job here. I’ve been here almost three years now, and similar experience here as a company that had a lot of growth opportunities and was looking to leverage out what it had built and expanded its customer base, so we jumped in and started doing that. Our baseline subscriber base has grown about 20% per year since I’ve been here, and we did an acquisition that more than doubled our subscriber base. So we’ve been busy here, and it’s been fun. I’m just really thankful to have landed in this career field.

Joe Coldebella:

No, that’s an awesome little setup. So, it’s funny. When I heard the name Poka Lambro, especially for Texas, I was confused by the name for a co-op in West Texas. But as soon as I heard the story behind it, it made perfect sense. So you guys started as a telephone co-op in the ’50s. If you could share the history and background, and evolution, that would be awesome.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. You bet. It was 1950 when that cooperative was actually formed. It was born out of the electric co-op that had been formed a few years prior, and there were some government programs that provided financing for phone networks, so they said, “Hey, let’s form a telephone cooperative.” So they got together in 1950 and formed that cooperative. The area at that time was a little smaller, but the cooperative area is now about 4,000 square miles now. So it’s quite a bit of a rural area. A lot of farmland. So as they formed it, trying to figure out what to name it, there were four major trade centers in the service area. None of these were actually part of the co-op area, but they were the places where everybody went and brought their cotton and their crops to come in, buy, and sell. The names of those four communities were Post, Tahoka, which is the Poka, and then Lamesa and Brownfield, which is the Lambro. So that’s how we got our name.

Joe Coldebella:

No. I love it. It’s just one of those things where it just re-emphasizes the sense of community, and just for the listeners, in terms of a context for 4,000 square miles, I’m currently in the state of Connecticut, which is a little over 4,000 square miles just to give a little context. You guys in Texas do everything bigger.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. We like things big, and we do have quite a spread-out area, but being rural, there’s not a lot of density inside of our area. So we have to figure out how to deal with those challenges.

Joe Coldebella:

So just in terms of challenges, so it’s… Obviously, in rural America, it’s an older population, and some folks, want to hold onto their landline. As your roots are a telephone company and you guys are transitioning to fiber, is that something that is mandatory for your customers? How does that work?

Patrick Sherrill:

It’s not. We did start our life as a regulated phone company. We’re still regulated as an incumbent local exchange carrier if anybody knows what that means. So we are accountable to the Public Utilities Commission.

Joe Coldebella:

Okay.

Patrick Sherrill:

We have tariffs, things like that, and the funding that helps you survive as a rural carrier has always been tied to those rules in the phone system. So for a long time, the way those rules were structured, you had to make sure that your end-user was connected to a phone line, even if all they wanted was broadband. A few years ago, the FCC made an order that gave you the option to choose whether you wanted to force the customer to take a phone line or if you could let them choose broadband only, and we chose to pursue that option. We knew our consumers. By and large, the phone line was less of an issue that a lot of them are using cell phones, and so we chose to use that regulatory option.

Fortunately, we did this before COVID happened, and when COVID happened, broadband lines shot up exponentially, and phone lines have declined slightly, but a lot of folks in rural areas, can’t depend on their cellphone. They just don’t have adequate cellphone coverage, so the landline is still important to them. So it’s still an important part of our business and something that we put a lot of effort and energy into. But definitely, when we think about our future and how to grow, our focus is on broadband.

Joe Coldebella:

No. That’s great. I love that you guys straddle the line in terms of you pay homage to your history, but you’re also looking forward because, obviously, broadband is our future. So, in terms of just population size, obviously, 4,000 square miles, so what communities do you guys cover?

Patrick Sherrill:

So we have communities as large as 9,500 population. I think there are two communities that are right around that, that size. A few other towns around 5,000, 2,000, and then we’ve got little farming communities that have a population of a hundred or 50. Then, of course, you go out from there, and we’ve got the actual farms that are just a farmhouse surrounded by a square mile of land.

Joe Coldebella:

Yeah. So it’s one of those things where when folks suggest that covering those smaller towns just… It doesn’t make sense if you want everyone to participate in the modern economy. So what sort of feedback are you getting from the folks when you do bring fiber to their area?

Patrick Sherrill:

Oh, they’re extremely excited, and the thing that I try to always point out to everybody that really doesn’t think much about rural communities and rural areas is in our area, we produce a whole lot of cotton. We produce wine grapes. Of course, there are ranches that have cattle. We also have quite a large array of wind farms. So the big windmills out in our service area. We’ve got a huge solar farm that’s in our area, and all of these things require space, and so they’re going to happen in a rural area, but they also require people, and those people and their businesses, they need to be able to have broadband to be connected.

At their home, they need broadband. Their kids need broadband when they go to school. They need broadband at home. So it’s really important not just for the rural areas and rural consumers, but these products that we produce in the rural areas are consumed by people in the urban areas. So having everybody connected to a network is incredibly important, and so we feel pretty passionate about what we do and pretty excited to be a part of this rural economy and contribute to the greater American economy.

Joe Coldebella:

No. That’s great and it’s funny. When you said solar farms, get it. Wind farms, get it. Agriculture, get it. So Texas is a big wine hotspot? I didn’t know that.

Patrick Sherrill:

If you haven’t had a Texas wine, you should go try one. A lot of the Texas wines folks go to what we call the Hill Country around San Antonio. They go down there, and there are resorts, and there are wineries, and they consume their wine there. It’s a great place to go. I recommend a trip, but what you don’t realize unless you really pay attention, is that a lot of those wines are made with grapes that come from West Texas where we’ve got this… we can do farming at scale. In fact, the statistic that I read recently is 80% of the Texas wine grapes are grown up here on the South Plains. To produce a lot of it, and it’s good quality stuff. So, yeah. I encourage everybody who hasn’t tried a Texas wine to give it a try.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s great. That’s great. So, obviously, 4,000 square miles is a massive area that you guys cover and one specific area that I think that the evolution that fiber is bringing is telehealth. I was just curious. It’s like we’re entering this phase where healthcare from anywhere, and in the past, it’s been a luxury, but I think now it’s evolving into a necessity, and I was just wondering. I know we’re in the early innings. Is that something that the rural communities in your area are embracing?

Patrick Sherrill:

Absolutely. In fact, I would say that in a lot of the rural areas, it’s more important to be able to get access to doctors through broadband because there’s just not always the population of doctors or maybe the specific specialists that you need, and so there is quite a bit of need in rural areas. A side story related to that. Our local hospital in one of our towns, when COVID hit, they needed to be able to react to that. They needed to be able to do testing for folks, and they were scrambling to do that. What they had decided to do is convert a barn that was on their property into a drive-through testing facility, and to be able to make it happen, they needed broadband.

It happened to be that this barn didn’t have any kind of facility connected to it, and so of course, they called us. We have a close relationship with them. They know what we’ve been able to do for them in the past, so they called, and they said, “Hey, we’re getting this thing deployed. We’re trying to do this quickly, and we know that you just can’t get cable in the ground quickly, but what can you do for us?”

So we put together our team and tried to figure out what we could do. I think it was three days that it took us to get the network constructed and get the broadband access to that facility so that they could be connected and performed that testing there in that barn. So it’s an example of how community-based companies, and cooperatives are always looking to help each other. We’re all in this together kind of thing. We’ll scramble and make things happen because it’s not just a service that we’re selling to somebody. It’s our community and it’s our residents that we’re trying to take care of in this.

Joe Coldebella:

Yeah. You know what, Patrick? It’s crazy. All the different stories that we hear were really awesome to show how Americans just rolled up their sleeves, especially in the rural communities, and we’re able to work together to get around COVID because I mean, it was crazy for a couple of years just in terms of just folks needing that connectivity just for survival.

Patrick Sherrill:

You bet. What happened here is our service orders went through the roof. Of course, we’re dealing with our own staff and COVID concerns and trying to keep everybody healthy, but there was no way we could delay hooking people up to the internet because what’s happening is they’re having to leave their workplace and work from home. We dealt with grandparents that needed… They needed connectivity because they couldn’t see their grandkids, and they needed to finally get on the internet.

Joe Coldebella:

Sure.

Patrick Sherrill:

We had a bunch of students. We worked with all of our area schools to make sure that students were hooked up either in their homes or we deployed some hotspots near the school so that students that didn’t have access to any internet can go there, be connected, and participate in their schoolwork because schools were shut down. So it was so busy that… You talked about rolling up your sleeves. I had to put on a tool belt, and go out there, and help our guys do some of our installations, which if you ask our guys, they’ll laugh, and they’ll tell you I was the least effective technician out there, but it was just something to help.

So it was so great for me to firsthand see what we were doing, and how critical it was to just people stay connected in a time that was a little scary. The world was changing so much, but to see how relevant our product was, was really important. So even though that was a bad time, I was thankful to go through that and see the good parts of what happens when we all pull together and the value of the service that we provide.

Joe Coldebella:

Well, right. It’s one of those things where you almost feel hesitant to say that there is a silver lining, especially for the broadband industry because it highlighted the importance of bringing connectivity to everyone. I think what it did is shined a light on just the lack of service and the absolute need for it, and I think that that is a nice segue into the next topic, which is funding. I saw just a few weeks ago that the NTIA released a map, and Texas had yet to submit all their paperwork, and then I just saw… We’re recording this episode in mid-July. I just saw that Texas, along with all the other states and all the other communities, had now submitted their plans to the NTIA and the billions of dollars that are going to be available. How important is getting access to that funding, and will your area be able to participate?

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. I wish I knew the answer to that question about being able to participate. Well, I’ll tell you this. We’re going to go aggressively after the funding. Fortunately, the original service area, the 4,000 square miles, is almost 100% fiber to the home. We’ve been able to participate in some of the traditional funding programs, universal service funds, and financing through the rural utility service, and we were able, over the course of our history, to upgrade our network to get fiber to the home to 99% of it. We do have a few outliers that are just really, really far off of the fiber footprint, and so we serve them with some fixed wireless product, but 99% of our subscribers are fiber to the home. So we really don’t need any CapEx type of funding to expand in our existing service area, but what we are looking at is the fringes.

Joe Coldebella:

Sure.

Patrick Sherrill:

So a lot of them are towns that were served by bigger nationwide carriers, but they’re towns that are not really big cities. They’re just towns of 5 to 10,000 population, and the incumbent carrier there has never really provided much broadband. So they’re dealing with old copper plants, DSL services, and things like that. So we’re hopeful that these areas will qualify for the various funding. For some of it, we’ve already applied for the RUS ReConnect funding, and we’re waiting on that to see if that gets approved. Of course, the bid money that’s going to come down, we’re looking at that, waiting on that application window to open. So, yeah. We’ll be participating in all those funds and hopeful that we can use them to leverage the footprint that we already have to expand broadband services.

Joe Coldebella:

No. That’s great. I think it just re-emphasizes the importance of having a local broadband provider because you’re right. A lot of the larger carriers serve the areas, but the services are woefully inadequate, and so it’s one of those things where it’s when someone has skin in the game, it’s like… I think that these larger companies have so much in terms of territory, but when you’re looking locally, you know where the areas that need to be addressed.

Patrick Sherrill:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the street knowledge that we have down to communities. There’s this one town that’s on my radar. It’s called Fluvanna, Texas, and the population there is probably 75. It’s just really, really small, but they don’t have very good broadband there. So we’re trying to figure out how can we get them quality broadband. So that’s the level of street knowledge that we have as a community is with a population under a hundred is one that’s on our radar and a problem that we’re trying to solve.

Joe Coldebella:

So, Patrick, as a local carrier, you’ve got a board of directors that serves two functions. One in the sense that they’re an ambassador for Poka, but also and more, probably more important is that they’re an advocate for the consumers. Could you talk about their role and how important they are in terms of being a voice for the community?

Patrick Sherrill:

You bet. It’s one of the great things about being formed as a cooperative. You’re member-owned, and part of our bylaws is that you have elected officials that come from each region of our service area, and those elected officials from the board of directors. There are seven members on our board of directors, and they’re my bosses. We meet once a month to discuss the business of the cooperative, but these directors, they’re community members, and they’re farmers, they’re businessmen, and so they’re just connected. They hear locally what’s going on, and where there’s needs, and they care about it because it’s their community. They bring that into the board room, and we figure out how to solve those problems.

So I just love working with these guys. I think that if there’s anything that’s maybe odd about that relationship, it’s that a normal board of directors is talking about profitability and how we maximize our return on investment. Our board of directors, sometimes they want to go and do something, and we say, “Wait a minute. We have to actually calculate that out and see if we can make that work,” but they’re just biased towards service.

Understand the business and that we have to keep cash flow and keep a small margin of profit just to make sure we stay in business, but there’s no big concern about, “Let’s pump ROI, and let’s get cash back to our shareholders.” It’s saying, “How do we provide the best service?” They all realize that broadband is one of these backbone infrastructures for the greater economy, and so they’re totally engaged in that. It’s just great to have those guys out there because they will promote us as you say, but also, they’ll let me know. If we’re not meeting the mark somewhere, I’m going to hear about it from the board, and we’ll jump on it and fix them.

Joe Coldebella:

Right. It’s like you said, that they were your bosses, and they basically hear it from their bosses, which is the general public, which is fantastic. I love it.

Patrick Sherrill:

You bet. Every year, we have an annual meeting. We invite all of our co-op members to come, and we get to hear from them directly. So it’s very much a member-focused, member-based, member-driven organization.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome. Just a couple more questions, and then we’ll wind down the interview. One question that I like asking folks is about workforce challenges. Obviously, broadband is being rolled out across the country. Do you guys have a problem with that, or is it one of those things where you’re located close to a fairly large population center, so then you’ve got an opportunity, plus you’ve got folks that are in the agro-industrial sort of area, and so they’re not afraid to get dirty, so to speak?

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. We are actually pretty fortunate. I know that there are a lot of companies out there that are having some workforce challenges. We are located fairly close to Lubbock, Texas, which has got a big university, a great engineering program. So we can get some technical people here and can fill some of those more advanced roles pretty easily. Then, as far as the blue-collar jobs, the guys in the field, yeah, we’ve got kids that grew up on farms.

The Permian Basin. Part of our service area is the Permian Basin, the oil field, which the folks that work in there, that area, they’re used to working hard. So we can get some guys that we can bring in right out of high school, and we can train them. They go out, and they make incredible broadband technicians. It gives them opportunities to learn new things, to learn tech skills, and we try to make an environment here where they want to stay. So we have guys that will work here for 35, 40 years and retire from Poka Lambro. So pretty blessed from that perspective, great group of people to work with, and usually, hiring for us is not a problem.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s great, and you guys are definitely in the minority. By the same token, it feels like it’s in your community’s DNA. In regards to the supply chain, it seems like you guys don’t think in months, but in years. So it must be gratifying for you guys to be ahead of the curve in that area.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yes. The supply chain is a challenge I think for everybody, but like anything else, it’s how you manage it, and so we could see ahead that certain plastic products, fiber, things like that were starting to come in short supply, and so we just ordered ahead, and we have good relationships with our suppliers and our vendors. They would help us scramble and buy things, so we just… We bought ahead, and we inventoried a lot of stuff, and so we’ve been able to weather the supply chain storm pretty well. Sometimes we get creative to figure out a little piece part that we didn’t think of, but for the most part, we’ve been able to continue to construct, supply drops, and meet the customer’s requirements, but we’re doing that because we’re just ordering ahead and holding the inventory so that we don’t get caught up the supply chain, I guess.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s awesome. Just out of curiosity. Do you have any wins you’d like to share with our listeners? It could be anything that you’ve done over the last few years that you’d like to highlight.

Patrick Sherrill:

Well, one thing that I’m really pleased with here at Poka Lambro, a lot of rural areas are shrinking. Technology, farm technology drives you to be able to do more farming with fewer people, and that depopulates rural areas. We happen to be really blessed that we’ve got some communities that are growing. It’s a little bit of just the economy changing, and some of our communities are bedroom communities for larger towns. So we have some growth. COVID, quite frankly, that drove up adoption rates, and so we’ve had some growth through that. So, yeah. Consider ourselves really blessed to be able to grow, and then the mixed blessing in that, it just… For example, when COVID hit, our subscriber base, I think it grew 16% in three months.

So we had this huge influx of new service orders and everybody trying to get hooked up. But during that same time period, the bandwidth demand on our network doubled. So not only were there more customers we were hooking up, but the people that were using our network were doing a lot more on it. So, fortunately, with fiber, the home infrastructure with planning ahead, we were able to meet that demand, and we didn’t have to worry about anybody being choked on a shared network, but that’s the thing that is a blessing and a curse because it tells you how important your product is, and you also have to make sure that you just stay ahead of that curve.

Joe Coldebella:

Absolutely, and so that brings me to my next question, which is… 4,000 square miles. I’m sure it’s been totally smooth sailing, and you haven’t had any challenges. But if by some chance, by some miraculous chance, you’ve had a few challenges, I would love it if you could highlight on how you address those.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. The moments of terror that we have been created by a backhoe or something like that.

Joe Coldebella:

I love that.

Patrick Sherrill:

Fiber cuts, those kinds of outages, boy, they’re tough because if you knock a customer down, then you’ve got a customer that’s disappointed, and usually, those fiber cuts don’t happen at the most convenient times. But fortunately, again, we’ve been able to design our network with a lot of redundancy in it. So we’ve had times when our fiber has been cut and no customers lose service because it’s just on a ring, and it goes around the other side of the ring, and we don’t have to have any outages. So it’s things that we’re constantly thinking about is looking at the robustness of our network, making sure it has redundancy, rings, backup power, things like that.

Joe Coldebella:

Then, recently, you were part of a panel discussion at an event in Texas. Could you talk about that and share with our audience how important it is to collaborate with other communities and broadband organizations in Texas?

Patrick Sherrill:

You bet. Yeah. Our association that we had done this panel discussion, it was the Texas Statewide Telephone Cooperative, which goes back quite a ways, and it’s basically a group of the small telcos and cooperatives in the state. Our meeting had a lot to do with the political, the broadband funding opportunities that were coming up, but our particular panel discussion was focused on operations and what we do to make sure we avail ourselves of opportunities that were in broadband, make sure we grow that part of our business.

So it’s really a pretty engaging discussion from all of the members about what you do to make sure that you stay ahead of the curve with broadband, and the challenges related to that are sometimes… In our particular industry segment, we’re highly regulated on the phone side. So sometimes we have these rules that tangle us up around the legs when we’re trying to move forward with the broadband. So we talked about how to be innovative, and creative, and how other people are solving those problems, and that kind of feedback is invaluable to us. So we’ve got really strong relationships with our fellow cooperatives. I’m talking with a different manager every week about how they’re solving problems. We share facilities, we swap inventory to help each other out. So it’s a great network of people to have.

Joe Coldebella:

That’s awesome, and in terms of solving problems, that leads us to our two final questions. So I’ll start with our Back to the Future question. Patrick, if I give you the keys to the DeLorean and you get to go back in time and whisper something in your ear or someone else’s ear to make the journey that you’ve been on a little bit easier, what’s something that you would either tell yourself or someone?

Patrick Sherrill:

That’s a great question. Starting my career on the engineering side and really starting before broadband was a thing when just internet connectivity became a thing and we were dealing with dial-up modems, we looked at the network saying, “Okay. Well, this is a phone network, and we’re going to let people add internet to it,” and the internet is always a secondary thing to the phone service. We knew that the internet would be a big deal, but the growth of demand for the internet and the growth of demand for bandwidth has been one of those exponential curves, which is really hard to predict. So I look back, and I think, “Man, we knew that it would be big. We just didn’t realize how big.” So, a lot of times, we invested in fiber, but we didn’t predict all the time how much fiber we would need. So if I could go back, I would tell myself, “Hey, over-plan these networks. Get a lot of fiber in there. Plan your optics to provide big broadband because it’s coming.”

Joe Coldebella:

Right. It’s like, “It’s big.” “No, it’s bigger.”

Patrick Sherrill:

It’s really big.

Joe Coldebella:

Right. It’s almost, from Jaws, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Patrick Sherrill:

Exactly. That’s a perfect, perfect meme for where we’re at in broadband. We’re going to need a bigger boat.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome, and then I would love it if I can give you the crystal ball if you could look three to five years into the future, what do you see happening for your communities just in terms of things you’re excited about?

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah. Well, it’s related to my first answer. There’s no limit to what’s coming that’s going to drive future broadband consumption. In our area, connectivity allows people to live in a rural area and enjoy a rural lifestyle, but still be connected, still be able to work in a sophisticated tech job, and still be able to produce. So I think the crystal ball that I’m looking at, I’m saying, “We’ve got to be ahead of this.” I’m hoping that the policymakers and the folks that have influence over the way that all this state and federal funding that’s coming out for broadband have the foresight to say, “Man, if we’ve got this kind of funding opportunity, let’s make sure that we drive fiber as deep into rural areas as we can because that demand curve is…” As you say, we’re going to need a bigger boat, so let’s build fiber. Let’s build it deep into the rural areas and really plan for that future and facilitate the future economy in these areas as well.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome answer. Patrick, thank you so much for visiting with us today. It’s always exciting learning about Texas and all that you guys are doing to close the digital divide. Truly appreciate your time.

Patrick Sherrill:

Yeah, Joe. Come see us someday, and we’ll find you some Texas wine.

Joe Coldebella:

Awesome. All right. Well, that’s going to do it for this episode of The Broadband Bunch. Until next time. We’ll see you later.