iverStreet Networks was established
in 1951 to create access to telephone
services in rural North Carolina.
The Communications Act of 1934 ensured that
having access to a telephone is an inalienable right,
leading to companies and cooperatives being
subsidized to build telephone infrastructure.
“Our mission at the time, although we didn’t know it,
was to serve the unserved,” says Jody Call, the
firm’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Until 2014,
the company had around 10,000 customers. This
changed when the government began reducing
subsidies due to a lack of access lines as a result
of the proliferation of mobile devices. “We had a lot of
attrition of our access lines and our company was
growing as more of a broadband provider. We had
overbuilt our entire network in our cooperative
footprint of about 10,000 customers with gigabit
fiber to the home, and we had pretty much cap-
tured the market here – so we started expanding
outside of the county,” he adds.R
As RiverStreet evolves
with the changing telecom
landscape, RiverStreet
Networks’ CTO tells us
about the company’s digital
transformation journey286
AUGUST 2019RIVERSTREET NETWORKS