Two family-owned businesses — H&B Communications of Holyrood and Wilson Communications of Wilson — have been working hard to keep parts of Central Kansas connected with highspeed fiber optic Internet service. Now, those services are expanding into the City of Ellsworth.

For Holyrood-based H&B Communications, the work began a little more than two years ago in 2018.

“We’ve kind of taken a phased approach in Ellsworth,” said Brandon Koch, president and general manager of H&B Communications. “We built into the downtown business district first and we started hooking customers up there in November of 2018. After that, we started taking on some residential builds.”

H&B offers fiber to the home, meaning when someone signs up for service, the company runs fiber optics all the way into the house with packages including Internet, phone service and TV. The company offers connection speeds up to 1GB — though Koch said they recognize not everyone will need connections that fast. There are a number of options available to customers.

“It gives us the capability to serve whatever speed they might need,” Koch said. “It also gives us a facility that has a lot of longevity. We believe that fiber will serve the community for many years to come.”

Koch said the company started building out its infrastructure on the west side of town in 2019. Earlier in 2020, the company moved into the east side of town.

“We just finished what we’re calling ‘phase 3’ of our build and hooking up customers there now,” he said. “We are continuing to look at whether there’s other areas of towns we can serve and other options that are available to them as well.”

And, Koch said, if there’s ever any trouble with the service help is just a phone call away and a few miles down the road.

“We treat everybody like our neighbors which, in reality, they kind of are,” he said.

Koch said that’s what inspired H&B to help out the communities they serve when Gov. Laura Kelly ordered a statewide shutdown of Kansas schools in March due to the novel coronavirus. Realizing that local schools would be struggling with how to deliver remote learning opportunities to some families in the area, Koch said H&B came up with a plan to help.

“We felt like, to help out all of the communities we serve, the right thing for us to do was try to facilitate that,” he said. “We made an offer to all of our customers who needed more bandwidth to either work from home or school from home to do a free upgrade for a period of time, to at least get them through the end of the school year. We also offered free services through the end of the school year to anybody we could serve who wasn’t even a customer of ours yet.” Some residents who signed

up for free services have stayed on as customers. Others have not. Koch said the goal was simply to meet a need in the community, and the company was happy to provide the services whether or not someone chose to remain a customer.

H&B Communications also provided free WiFI in most of the communities it serves with hot spots that could be accessed in various locations. Koch said the experience likely opened many people’s eyes on how important reliable Internet access is to everyday operations.

“It was kind of ironic because everybody was in shutdown mode and our workers were out there with masks and gloves on, and stepping people through installs over the phone instead of going into people’s homes,” Koch said. “We were flooded with work related to the offer that we made while a lot of other people were worried about whether they were going to go to work.”

Koch said H&B is looking forward to continuing its service in Ellsworth and looking at other ways the company can offer better services to the community.

“We are trying to meet all of the needs of our customers and trying to make sure we customize that to fit the needs of the rural communities that we service,” he said. “We are a family company and we embrace that. We try to treat our employees and our customers as a family company would.”

At Wilson Communications, expanding service to meet growing customer demand for broadband Internet, IT, voice and TV services, has also been a top priority.

“Broadband Internet and Managed IT service are two areas where we continue to experience record growth,” said Eric Heath, director of sales and marketing for Wilson Communications. “We have added professional staff to keep up with the growth of our business.”

Heath said broadband service is essential to the economic and social viability of rural communities, connecting the public to education, health care, business and worldwide markets. The need for connections was made even more apparent when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Kansas.

Thankfully, Wilson Communications was ready to meet that demand.

In 2018, the company began building out into Ellsworth with an expansion into the northeast part of town. Heath said Wilson Communications buries its fiber directly to the premises, making service less susceptible to weather-related outages and improving overall customer experiences. Services have continued to expand along Highway 156 and the company continues to look for areas where it “makes sense” to build out service.

“The COVID-19 pandemic really demonstrated the essential need for broadband in our communities,” Heath said. “When the pandemic began to force everyone to stay at home, Internet Service Providers nationwide saw an average usage increase of around 60 percent, and we experienced an increase of nearly twice that at just under 120 percent.”

With such a large increase in demand, Heath said the company took measures to limit potential exposure to COVID-19 while still providing uninterrupted service to customers.

“Beyond that, the pandemic has not necessarily slowed our progress,” he said. “It has refocused our efforts to ensure our communities — in particular our students, teachers, and remote workers — remain connected to vital information and resources. Our broadband service is essential to keep our lives and economy moving forward.”

Like H&B, Wilson Communications also set into action to provide Internet connections to students and teachers who did not already have service.

“We also continued to operate our community Wi-Fi hotspots free of charge,” Heath said. “By doing this, we were already out in front of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s call on telephone and Internet providers to ‘Keep Americans Connected’ during the global coronavirus pandemic.”

Heath said Wilson Communications will continue its commitment to customers, both through the services provided and involvement in the community.

“Our staff is actively involved in civic and economic development organizations, and we live and work right here in the communities we serve,” he said. “We will continue to offer the latest broadband, phone, TV, and information technology services available in the marketplace today. We want to make a difference for the people that make a difference for us.”

Residents interested in learning more about Wilson Communications services can call 800-432-7607 to see Internet service is available in their area, or visit www.wilsoncommunications.co for more information.

More information on H&B is available at www.hbcomm.net or call 800-432-8296. hard to do during a pandemic, after all.

Freeman officially came on board in March, shortly before the novel coronavirus spurred a statewide shutdown of schools and businesses. With the company’s commitment to providing continued service and upgrades for students and teachers for distance learning, helping those working from home with increased bandwidth and speeds, and halting late fees and disconnects, he said he knew he made the right move.

“The ownership and the employees have been so supportive of these decisions,” he said. “Their great attitude and willingness to extend a hand to the community or take the extra precautions to protect our customers and employees has made dealing with the pandemic much more manageable. It helped me understand I had made the right choice to join Wilson Communications.”

Freeman is grateful for the Grauers’ support over the last few months as he came on board and looks forward to meeting more and more people in the community. The support for the community and willingness to help out their neighbors in a time of need showed Freeman that he made the right choice when he joined the team.

“It has been so rewarding to see how the ownership and the employees have responded to the challenges we have faced as a result of the pandemic,” Freeman said. “I am so happy to be a part of an organization where the willingness to support your communities and help out your neighbors is simply part of their DNA.”