It is finally official. 

 After years of meetings, correspondence and planning, GCI Broadband and North Georgia Network have joined together to bring high speed Internet service to Stephens County. GCI has obtained a lease from the City of Toccoa to utilize the Meadowbrook Water Tank as our primary distribution point. The Stephens County Industrial Authority sponsored a One Georgia Grant to enable NGN to construct a fiber network to Toccoa. The Meadowbrook Industrial park was very near fiber NGN fiber. Utilizing grant funding, NGN will establish a fiber Point of Presence (POP) within the park to deliver their services to the Meadowbrook site.  With this connection GCI Broadband will now be able to provide industry, businesses  and residents around the park and in short time throughout Stephens County with world class connectivity to the internet.

Our service agreement with NGN will provide a much needed additional benefit to our network and to our customers. Our primary upstream Internet service provider for the last three years is Habersham EMC. Because of the close working relationship between Habersham EMC, NGN and GCI Broadband, we will be able to establish automatic failover routing between our two providers. This relationship will benefit our customers who have critical service applications. For the first time, these customers will have the ability to establish truly independent redundant connections to redundant upstream providers through a GCI Broadband as the last mile provider. 

While our competitors may be able to provide physical diversity in the routing of their lines and cables, those lines eventually route back to the same network facilities to reach the cloud.

GCI Broadband will be able to provide a critical customer redundant wireless connections which route back to the cloud not only through physically different service paths, but through different service providers. Providing maximum uptime to critical applications. 

Stephens County is just our starting point. GCI Broadband is already planning the distribution points and making contact with the local officials to extend our network into Franklin, Hart and Banks County. If you are a customer in these counties, please let us and your Industrial Development Authority Director know of your interest.