About

Cooperatives like Copper Valley Telephone Cooperative (CVTC) are non-profit corporations that were originally created to provide vital services to their customers, most of whom are member-owners. Any profit or margin beyond the cost to deliver those vital services eventually gets returned to the members as capital credits.

Running any large business is complicated, and a telecommunications cooperative like CVTC is more complicated than most. There are many technical, legal, accounting, and regulatory issues that CVTC has to navigate successfully, and CVTC has to compete against and do business with some of the biggest telecommunications and technology businesses in the world.

Just as a for-profit corporation has shareholders who elect a Board of Directors to oversee the company and protect their interests, cooperative members also elect a Board of Directors to oversee the Cooperative and protect the members’ interests. At CVTC, each member of CVTC gets to vote for the four directors who represent their district. Those directors spend many hours every month reviewing information and participating in Board meetings. They set policy for CVTC and oversee the overall success of the Cooperative. They are legally responsible for the management of CVTC and can be held liable in court if they do not carry out that responsibility. They are your representatives, and they are all fellow members of CVTC.

The Board of Directors create policies on employment and decide what rates to charge. It would be too difficult and expensive for the entire membership to oversee those tasks, which is why those responsibilities are given to the Board members you elect who can then take the time to make those decisions on your behalf. If the members don’t think that the Board is doing a good job, they can elect new Board members. Board members are, thus, always accountable to the members.

The Bylaws are only supposed to provide the overall governing framework for the Cooperative. They explain how people become members, how directors are elected, and how Board and member meetings are held. The Bylaws are difficult to change because it takes a good deal of time and money to hold a vote of the members to approve Bylaw changes. The Bylaws are not supposed to be the Cooperative’s policies on employment or even its Board policies.

From time to time we field inquiries from our co-op members about the Alaska Plan, a program of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to subsidize rural telephone service and increase Internet connectivity. To better address those inquiries, we decided to create this page to explain what the Alaska Plan is and how it impacts our customers.

Historically, rural telephone companies relied on subsidies to offset the high cost of providing basic, universal telephone service, as first required under the federal Communications Act of 1934. In recent times, however, the FCC extended high-cost support to include Internet services as an incentive for rural telephone companies to build out Internet connectivity to their customers.

For Alaska, the FCC in 2016 developed a new set of regulations, called the Alaska Plan, to account for the unique characteristics and extremely high costs of serving our state. Commencing January 1, 2017, the Alaska Plan set forth a ten-year time frame with which to increase Internet speeds for both wireline (fiber and copper network) and wireless (4G LTE mobile network) service. Not all Alaska rural phone companies chose to receive financial support for both wireline and wireless services (and a couple chose to opt-out of the Alaska Plan altogether), but CVTC chose to participate in both programs and, thus, we receive subsidies according to respective formulas that were adopted by the FCC.

At the end of ten years, the Alaska Plan will have funded much faster Internet speeds across the state — download speeds of at least 25 Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3 Mbps — for almost 70,000 rural wireline customers and up to 100,000 rural wireless customers. What that means for Valdez and the Copper River Basin is that 90% of our wireline customers will have access over fiber to 25 Mbps by 3 Mbps speeds or faster, while our wireless network will be completely converted to 4G LTE.

Over the Alaska Plan’s ten-year program both the wireline and wireless components will require annual reporting updates to the FCC. Near the half-way point in 2021, the FCC will look specifically at the wireless program to reevaluate competitive overlap, which is a condition when two or more wireless companies are subsidized for serving the same area with 4G LTE coverage.

Overall, the Alaska Plan reflects the extremely high cost of building and maintaining vital infrastructure in our region. While we will continue to offer traditional telephone service, the Alaska Plan will help CVTC migrate to the most modern Internet infrastructure that supports speeds fast enough to deliver the kinds of state-of-the-art communication services that rural customers increasingly need and demand in the modern age.

You can download and read the official FCC Order establishing the Alaska Plan here.