CASPER, WY – For over a hundred years and as Natrona County’s seat, the city of Casper has led the charge adopting new technology to better connect its community members, dating back to 1910 when residents received their first 300 phone lines. In the 15 years from 1910 to 1925, Casper gained 5,600 telephone lines. In 1953, Community Antenna Television, also known as CATV, was adopted in Casper to deliver television service that had been previously blocked by the mountain South of Casper, making way for cutting-edge cable television connectivity. Today, Visionary Broadband is proud to announce it has been awarded a grant to provide future-proof fiber Internet connectivity to homes and businesses near the Casper-Natrona International Airport.
Visionary Broadband provides high-speed internet service to communities in the rural West including Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana. The recent grant was awarded through the competitive Connect Wyoming Initiative and totals $1.12 million in Capital Project Funds, allowing Visionary to build high speed internet service to nearly 324 homes and businesses around northwest Casper, Wyoming. Visionary contributed over $500,000 of its own capital in a grant match to complete this project.
“We contributed Visionary’s capital into this important broadband project through a grant match,” stated Brian Worthen, CEO of Visionary Broadband. “We did this intentionally to show how serious we are building out rural connectivity and doing the right thing for the communities we serve.”
Visionary pinpointed 324 users in and around northwest Casper that suffer from slow or no internet service at all, referred to as underserved and unserved. The grant award identified 66 homes and businesses as underserved and 258 as unserved, meaning these locations did not have acceptable internet speeds by the modern definition.
To meet the new high-speed requirements of the federal government and the Wyoming Broadband Office, broadband constructed with the grant funds must provide upload and download speeds of 100 Mbps, or megabits per second. The old requirements were 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. The funding will allow Visionary to provide the infrastructure for Fiber to the Home (FTTH) internet service, which is state of the art technology.
“The project is entirely fiber, delivering a Fiber to the Home product capable of symmetric gigabit speeds. Fiber is the latest and most scalable technology and is expected to be the standard in Internet connectivity for years to come,” explained Brian Worthen, CEO of Visionary.
The grant was awarded by the Wyoming Broadband Office and the Wyoming Business Council. The Wyoming Business Council’s goal is to ensure that every citizen and business in The Cowboy State has access to affordable, state-of-the-art, reliable internet service.
“The Wyoming Broadband Office did a phenomenal job awarding grants in the areas of greatest need to meet the federal requirements. It was not a small lift. We’re proud of the fact that in many of the communities we were awarded grants, work is already underway,” expressed Greg Worthen who heads up community engagement in Wyoming.
“In fact,” Worthen reflected, “work in Casper begins this week.”
About Visionary Broadband:
Visionary Broadband was founded in 1994 in a rural community in Wyoming. It is a homegrown company that has developed technical abilities with a focus on reliability. Today, the rural internet provider serves five states and has a proven track record of connecting the most rural communities, bringing a commitment of efficiency, reliability and affordability to its customers. To learn more visit,
https://www.vcn.com/