For more than 70 of his 94 years, Ben Leonard has been preaching the gospel in rural Arkansas. Now, with his electric cooperative’s broadband service, he’s taking his message around the world.
First Electric Cooperative’s fiber subsidiary, Connect2First, recently delivered high-speed internet to Leonard’s church, and with that the veteran preacher has learned he has congregants far and wide.
The Cabot-based co-op’s broadband service has “expanded the way that we can get out the good news of the gospel,” said Leonard. “Being able to use the internet as we do, we’re able to reach people that are in the hospital, in a nursing home or who are invalids at home. It’s an opportunity for us. We’ve even had some contact with people … in foreign countries.”
Connect2First began building its fiber-optic network in March 2020 to improve the co-op’s system communications and then expanded to retail internet service in July 2021 to meet members’ needs for modern commerce, education, teleworking and health care.
Today, the co-op’s broadband network stretches over 6,000 miles to serve more than 32,500 subscribers with symmetrical speeds of 200 megabits per second all the way to 1 gigabit.
“Our membership became very vocal about wanting us to deliver fiber internet services to the rural communities in areas that had historically been left out and had not had reliable high-speed internet,” said Randy Everett, chief broadband officer for Connect2First. “The desire to meet their need became more and more prevalent as we built our fiber backbone.”
Rough terrain and the remoteness of service locations were major challenges along the way, he said.
“But just like in the 30s and 40s, these areas did not have electricity, and it wasn’t because it wasn’t possible,” said Everett. “It was just because it was very difficult to do. That’s the co-op difference.”
Leonard witnessed that difference firsthand as a teenager in the summer of 1946 when Star City, Arkansas-based C&L Cooperative wired and electrified his family’s farmhouse.
“My daddy was honored to pay a $5 fee to become a member of what we called ‘REA’ because he had a vision of what was going to happen,” said Leonard.
Soon his mother ordered a refrigerator from the iconic department store Montgomery Ward and his dad got a pump to bring water into their house from a field well more than 1,200 feet away.
“That was one of the big things for us, was to get running water at the house,” Leonard said. “My mom thought she gained the greatest prize of all when she could turn on a spigot in the kitchen and get water.”
The family first learned their electricity was turned on when they were sitting on the back porch one hot July day and heard “a racket, something uncommon,” he said. “We got up to see and the refrigerator was running.”
His family went from trudging out to the well to retrieve water and lowering a bucket full of milk into the well to keep it cool to “going to the refrigerator and pulling out a jug,” he said.
Leonard likens the benefits a co-op brought his family with electricity to the infinite progress possible today because of broadband from Connect2First.
“It seems to me that the internet has no boundaries; you can reach beyond what we even begin to think about,” he said. “I see where it started back there in drawing water out of a dug well and pouring it in a barrel and hauling it 1,282 feet to the house to turning on a spigot and seeing it run.
“To see the progress that has been made. And it goes back to those who dedicated their lives back then to make life better for us here.”
Cathy Cash is a staff writer for NRECA.