How Our Continual Innovation Transforms Communities Without Added Complexity

As an electric cooperative that has successfully served its members across rural Mississippi for 90 years, we know a few things about meeting the needs of our community. Launching our fiber business—Tombigbee Fiber—on the Calix Broadband Platform in 2020 enabled us to quickly provide services beyond basic connectivity to differentiate in the market and add value for our members.
 

This initially meant ensuring every subscriber had a safe, secure, connected experience in their home—with network security (ProtectIQ®) and advanced parental controls (ExperienceIQ®), included at no extra cost as part of our SmartHome™ managed Wi-Fi service. We continued to enhance that safe, connected experience by offering managed services, such as the Bark monitoring app, to keep young people safe online. Offering these advanced services allows us to stand out in the market, and, more importantly, it ensures our members’ safety and adds real value to our communities. This commitment to our community and the people we serve is reflected in our remarkably high Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS^®), which consistently exceeds 90.

Innovating at Speed To Deliver Value for Our Communities

To deliver additional value for our members and maintain our unique position in the market, we must continually differentiate and innovate. This is where the Calix Broadband Platform gives us the edge. We built our network using the latest technology, which is simple to operate and has common cloud management across all systems, services, and subscribers.
 

We leverage Intelligent Access™ for a simplified network architecture, Unlimited Subscriber to provide our premises optical network terminals (ONTs) and gateways, and Calix Cloud to enhance operations with analytics, insights, and automation. This end-to-end platform is critical in delivering seamless technology integrations. Plus, Calix introduces new features and services every 91 days, so we always have opportunities to bring the latest innovations to our members. And we can do so without reengineering our systems and processes every time.
 

This flexible platform also helped us positively impact our communities by providing secure, reliable broadband via Calix SmartTown™. This pioneering community Wi-Fi solution has enabled us to:

• Enhance the Friday night football experience. Friday night football games are the cultural heartbeat of many small towns across our footprint. By rolling out SmartTown across nine high school football fields—at no cost to the schools—we provided new ways for communities to share their football experience.
  
  
• Provide secure and reliable Wi-Fi for first responders. We made SmartTown freely available to 68 first responder organizations in our service territory in Mississippi. This provides critical communication lines for first responders who cannot rely on patchy cell coverage—and it is there to save lives.
  
  
• Connect community spaces. Secure outdoor Wi-Fi via SmartTown debuted in Mantachie in June 2023 and has since been rolled out to parks, schools, downtown areas, and other community spaces across 13 small towns.

Our pioneering deployment of SmartTown has accelerated Tombigbee’s ongoing mission to enrich our communities. Because we run our business on the Calix Broadband Platform, this game-changing offering was deployed at minimal cost without straining our workforce or systems.
 

Such ongoing service innovation is key to keeping us one step ahead of the competition and ensuring our NPS remains among the very highest in the industry.
 

Watch our video to learn more about how Tombigbee is transforming communities with the power of the platform.
 

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.