MCNC Spreads Broadband to Rural Areas

Federal and state leaders are celebrating the second phase of a major broadband initiative across North Carolina.

Today’s virtual ground-breaking will take place in four corners of the state – including the Elizabeth City State University campus and the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis.  Joe Freddoso is president and C-E-O of M-C-N-C.  He says the independent, non-profit has been funded to build more than15-hundred miles of broadband infrastructure – statewide.

Joe Freddoso:  "The institutions that we were serving, those k-12 school districts and the universities that are not in a metro area and the community colleges that are in our rural counties, their band width demand was growing by 30 to 40-percent per year and we started to run into capacity issues."

More than 100-million-dollars in stimulus money, millions from the Golden Leaf Broadband Initiative and others helped make the project possible.