BrightRidge Broadband posts 10,000 subscribers; access available to 30,000 locations

JOHNSON CITY – BrightRidge Broadband exceeded 10,000 subscribers to its nation-leading next generation broadband service this week, a major milestone for the nearly four-year-old startup service by BrightRidge.

Currently, BrightRidge Broadband has infrastructure in place to serve nearly 30,000 locations in Washington County and Johnson City. A $2.3 million project funded by the City of Johnson City is nearly complete in the eastern part of the City and work underway along the Bristol Highway corridor to Piney Flats. When completed later this year, the Bristol Highway project will bring access to about 3,320 locations that currently do not have BrightRidge Broadband available. “We could not be more pleased with the community response to BrightRidge Broadband,” BrightRidge CEO Jeff Dykes said Friday. “The biggest compliant we receive is that we are not rolling out fast enough. We have cut two years off our originally planned roll out thanks to smart work internally as well as grants from Tennessee and Johnson City, but it does take a good bit of time with a startup to secure funding and build out the necessary infrastructure.”

“We were very disappointed that we did not receive the grant from Tennessee in 2022, particularly with the Washington County Commission willing to fully support the effort with grant matching funds,” BrightRidge Chief Broadband Officer Stacy Evans said. “Sparsely populated areas cost up to 8 times what it costs to serve a more densely populated area. This makes it difficult to build out rural areas without grant or local governmental support.”

Further, work continues in the Fall Branch area building off an earlier pandemic-related grant, which will open service to 387 locations in the next two months. And in mid-2024, BrightRidge Broadband will begin construction in Colonial Heights, which was not in the original build plan.
At the same time, BrightRidge Broadband will be reapplying later this year for state grant funding to continue expanding in rural Washington County beyond the 8,200 locations with service available.

“We were very disappointed that we did not receive the grant from Tennessee in 2022, particularly with the Washington County Commission willing to fully support the effort with grant matching funds,” BrightRidge Chief Broadband Officer Stacy Evans said. “Sparsely populated areas cost up to 8 times what it costs to serve a more densely populated area. This makes it difficult to build out rural areas without grant or local governmental support.”

BrightRidge Broadband is unique in the country, with only a handful of other communities having access to a full 10 GB of internet connectivity, and virtually none offering fully symmetrical services, which provides the same headline bandwidth on both uploads and downloads. And BrightRidge just increased the speed of its lowest cost offerings from 200 MB to 300 MB and from 500 MB to 600 MB (symmetrical) at no cost to customers.

“When we say nation-leading next generation broadband, we mean it,” Evans said. “We’re working with our customers daily to save them money on their telecommunications services and cutting the cord on traditional high-cost cable video by helping customers make the move to streaming video.”