FAYETTEVILLE, Arkansas — OzarksGo, a local fiber-optic telecommunications subsidiary of Ozarks Electric Cooperative, announced today that it has completed construction in the Ozarks Electric footprint and has connected its 35,000th subscriber.
Guy Smith of the Crosses, Arkansas area received an Apple TV 4K for streaming his OzarksGo TV service and an Apple iPad for surfing the internet with the fast and reliable OzarksGo internet.
“We just moved out here and we have to go to the main road just to get cell service,” Smith said. “To think we will be able to do doctor appointments and shop from our living room is unbelievable with OzarksGo.”
He was surprised to receive the TV set up with the help of the installers and to go through his new cooler full of OzarksGo gifts.
OzarksGo connected its first customer in 2017 in west Springdale and has since made internet, television, and phone service available to almost all Ozarks Electric members across Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Oklahoma.
“We could not continue to bring state-of-the-art internet to Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Oklahoma without the help of our employees and those customers who continue to be our best advocates,” said Steve Bandy, general manager of OzarksGo. “Building a world-class fiber network from scratch is not an easy task, but we believe high-speed internet access is a critical service in the 21st Century, whether you live in an urban area or a rural part of the country.”
Currently, OzarksGo provides residential internet speeds up to one gigabit, along with TV and telephone service. In 2023, OzarksGo will be offering multigigabit services to our residential customers and will continue expanding fiber deployment outside of the Ozarks Electric footprint to ensure many more in the region will benefit from its services.
The fiber network also benefits Ozarks Electric members by enabling smart grid technology to reduce outages and outage durations. Since OzarksGo launched, several other Arkansas electric cooperatives have started their own fiber projects. They recently announced Diamond State Networks will be uniting the fiber-optic networks of electric cooperatives throughout Arkansas to further improve the growth of high-speed connections throughout our state.