Silverton Residents Finally Receive Phone Service
As published in Rural Utility Service Newsletter, Sep 2006
By Brigham Griffin, 11 Sep 2006

If you were holding a phone for the first time, who would you call? For Diane Boyd, the first resident in Silverton, Washington, to receive phone service, the first phone call she made from her home was to her 80-year-old mother. Denny & Diane Boyd moved to the Silverton area in 1975, a former mining town on the Mountain Loop Highway, 22 miles east of Granite Falls in Snohomish County, Washington. Boyd has been working tirelessly every since to persuade a phone company to bring service to the area. “I probably spent about $1000 over the past nine years in letters, travel and mailings to various people and to the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, and while most residents in the area had given up long ago lobbying for phone service, I guess I was too stubborn to let go of my dream of having phone service here.”
The company that finally made that dream a reality is the newly established Timberline Telephone Company, headed by Garrin Bott. Bott’s group bought the floundering Beaver Creek Telephone Corporation, which had been established years before in 1999 by entrepreneur, Joel Eisenberg, who read a New York Times article explaining the situation in Silverton, and decided to launch a company to bring telecommunications service to the residents there. After years of struggling with the obstacles incumbent with this project, the owners of Beaver Creek had reached a point where they wanted out of the business—one of the original principals had retired, his silent partner didn’t want to take active control, and Bott heard about their problems through a mutual friend, a lawyer who was doing business with both him and Beaver Creek. After a series of discussions, Bott was offered the business.

As Bott explains: “The only circumstances  under which we felt we could take on this opportunity were if it were treated like any other ILEC(Independent Local Exchange Carrier), which was a format we were familiar with. We serve several other areas that are high-cost areas, although none of them is quite as high cost as this area. Silverton is in rough terrain, along a river, and like neighboring Granite Falls, is known for granite, so construction is difficult and expensive. Also, a lot of it is National Forest land, and acquiring additional permits to dig  across the forest land only lengthened the time and expense involved before we could begin construction.  The incredibly high cost of doing construction was a deterrent to anybody building a network there, even though there was a pocket of about 50 homes out there to serve. It was only through the RUS loan program, and the Federal and State Universal Service programs, that we felt we could accomplish this.
Once the company was recognized as an ILEC by the FCC and Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, which allowed us to receive an RUS loan and USF funds, we could go forward with the project. Without those funds, this area would most likely still not have service.”

When asked what she would say to those people who oppose the RUS or USF funding programs, Boyd replies: “Well, we have paid taxes all our lives like the rest of the population, so I feel we deserve the opportunity to have help getting communications service. We really felt out of touch with today’s modern world without phone or internet service, because so much of life today is geared towards the internet. We couldn’t even order clothes from a catalog or call our spouses to let them know we would be home late if we had an emergency at work. A lot of residents here died of old age waiting for phone service to reach them.”
Boyd says her biggest problem now is training herself not to fall and break a leg to answer the phone, because she still gets so excited each time she receives a call. “People who have always been connected don’t realize the convenience of having a phone. Before Timberline installed our service, I would drive 11 miles to Verlot ranger station to make a call, and luckily, because I was a ranger, I had a key to go inside to use the phone. The rest of people in Silverton would have to use the phone booth outside the ranger station, which wasn’t ideal in the dead of winter.”

Bott says having a telecommunications infrastructure will bring more stability and opportunity to the community. “Several of the residents have told us they are really happy they can finally do some work from home—and some people will now even be able to telecommute fulltime. For some, their home in Silverton was their secondary dwelling, but they said it would become their primary dwelling once they had phone service, so it was a good opportunity for the community. They can connect and talk with the world. Our phone service gives them access to advanced EMT services—before all they had was one radio in town, which only worked sometimes, and in emergencies they used this faulty radio to call for help. Now they will all have 911 phone access—it’s a safety issue they were worried about. They also become citizens of the USA, and get connected to the country’s network, so it’s a very god thing for them overall.”

Bott reckons Silverton will have a network probably more advanced than Seattle, because the Silverton network has more modern electronics, and the copper is newer.  Although Timberline Telecom designed the original network for a fiber optic build, they ultimately had to use copper because the homes in Silverton don’t have electricity yet. “To install fiber to the home, you need power on the home, and basically the last place for power along the line was our central office, so we had to use copper to power the dial tone. But everything was engineered and constructed to allow us to provide broadband to everyone there in the future, and that will be our next phase—to turn on the broadband in six months to year.”

The network cost about two million dollars to build, and service has been installed in 31 homes since Timberline began hooking people up on 17th July, 2006. Bott feels a great sense of accomplishment now that the residents finally have service. “Our loan application was submitted in 1999, so we are pushing 7 years.  It’s been a long process, but, it’s another good example of USF doing what it was designed to do, even though Silverton was a high cost area.  An investment like this is never going to be a cash cow, it’s more of a challenge than anything, but it’s been rewarding to see the phones working.  It’s really relief to see that the customers have service.”
How do the residents of Silverton feel? “Celebrating in a way,” says Bott, “Making a lot of phone calls.”