Smithville Chooses COS Service Zones to Verify Demand for Residential Fiber

BLOOMINGTON, IN – In addition to connecting business and residential customers in their ILEC (local encumbent exchange carrier) areas with fiber, Smithville, an independent telephone company, has been making big investments over the past few years to also expand its fiber-optic network to business customers in CLEC (phone company started post 1996) areas throughout the state. Now they are looking to extend their high-speed fiber offering to residents in these challenging areas as well. To do so, they are using COS System’s demand aggregation platform COS Service Zones to secure that enough residents are willing to sign up to ensure a return on the investment justifying the build-out.

“Building fiber here in Indiana is not an easy task with all the rock and Limestone. When targeting businesses, it’s easier to get the numbers together but we have now been considering our options on how to bring fiber to the residents in our CLEC areas for quite some time. We concluded that there’s only one way to do it without taking too big risks. We need to sell before we build,” says Smithville COO Dave Brodin.

COS Systems' Out-of-the-Box Solution
“Initially we thought about developing something for this ourselves, but then found that COS Systems actually have an out-of-the box solution designed to do exactly what we wanted to do. It allows us to split our targeted area into competing neighborhoods and set take-rate targets for each neighborhood to reach. People can pre-signup for services, making a credit card deposit to verify that they are committed. People who are willing to make an extra effort in getting their neighborhood connected can also sign up as Champions through the website and we take really good care of those local heroes, get to know them and then use their help to do some of the local marketing,” says Melissa Wright, Project Manager at Smithville.

Extensive Reporting Functionality
COS Service Zones is a self-service tool for those planning to build a broadband network. By simply logging in to your cloud-hosted installation you can draw neighborhood zones in your intended service area. Then you decide on a target take-rate for each and every neighborhood to reach to get the network built first to them. In addition to social media integrations, referral programs and other features to build local engagement COS Service Zones comes with extensive reporting functionality to easily provide accurate and timely data supporting decision making.

“I’m not the one working in the system, but I still log in every morning to check out the dashboard to see what progress we’ve had since the day before. I can, for example, quickly see if a marketing activity has had a good effect. Due to the high cost of building here in Indiana we have quite high take-rate targets for our neighborhoods and who knows, despite our efforts we might not get enough customers signed up to move into the residential market with fiber just yet. But knowing that might actually be the biggest values of using a platform like Service Zones. Imagine if we had spent all that money and built the network only to find out later that people didn’t want it. That would have been really expensive,” concludes Brodin.