Connecting rural California with fiber internet for a better future

Located in the heart of Mendocino County, Comptche, California is a charming, rustic town that paints a harmonious picture of rural life in Northern California. A mesmerizing landscape where towering redwoods touch the sky, the pace of life is slow and steady, yet the hustle and bustle of urban life is never far away.

With a population of about 200 residents and the average property about 40 acres, Comptche is truly a quiet and idyllic rural California community.

Although, make no mistake about it, rural or not, Comptche residents require modern communications for bandwidth-rich activities such as online learning, telecommuting, tele-health and entertainment. However, residents and businesses did not have access to fixed broadband service to meet these demands.

We recently announced the new availability of AT&T Fiber to more than 75 customer locations in parts of Comptche, serving residential and small businesses in the area, providing the rural community with the modern high-speed network infrastructure needed in today’s economy. today. This investment was made possible through community collaboration, including work with the Comptche Broadband Committee.

Watch the Video Here

Bringing fiber to communities like Comptche is another example of how we’re working with communities across California to upgrade our aging copper networks to more resilient and advanced technologies like fiber. For rural communities, improving our network not only helps narrow the digital divide, it also means improving network resilience, which helps networks withstand and recover from natural disasters and severe weather events.

We have invested nearly $8.6 billion in our networks in California from 2020-2022. Building on the more than 3.1 million customer locations in California that currently have access to AT&T Fiber, we’re working to extend fiber to more residents and small businesses in 2024, including in underserved communities. And, we’ll keep the momentum going all year, as California has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help bridge the digital divide with the influx of federal and state funding for high-speed broadband.

We are proud of the collaborative work being done at Comptche to expand and modernize our digital infrastructure. We remain committed to improving technology to make fiber Internet available to more California communities, including rural communities like Comptche, so that more Californians have access to reliable high-speed Internet and affordable that is needed for today’s connectivity needs.

In this short video, see why this project was so important to residents and local leaders in this corner of rural California.