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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.

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Leoneda Inge is the co-host of WUNC's "Due South." Leoneda has been a radio journalist for more than 30 years, spending most of her career at WUNC as the Race and Southern Culture reporter. Leoneda’s work includes stories of race, slavery, memory and monuments. She has won "Gracie" awards, an Alfred I. duPont Award and several awards from the Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA). In 2017, Leoneda was named "Journalist of Distinction" by the National Association of Black Journalists.
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