Who wouldn't want to live in a place named Guadalupe Valley? By the rate of growth in certain parts of that community, it would seem the answer is: nobody

The Guadalupe Valley Telecommunications Cooperative in Texas is unlike most co-ops. Nor is the valley it serves like most other valleys. If they were faces, they would be Picassos, with two sides slightly misaligned or unmatched altogether. GVTC is a 50-year old co-op with typical co-op features: rural communities stretching for miles across rolling hills and prairie plains, a small team of technologists supporting multiple technologies and close ties to the community it serves. But that's only half the story.

GVTC is also growing by leaps and bounds in upscale neighborhoods populated by people taking advantage of the valley's proximity to San Antonio and to the airport.

“It's not that we don't have areas that are as rural as any part of the country,” said Ritchie Sorrells, president and CEO of GVTC. “But we are within 30 minutes of the seventh-largest city in the country and within 30 minutes of a major international airport. So we have a unique demographic diversity.”

The landscape itself is similarly conflicted. It shifts from prairie grass to rolling hills to high bluffs to rivers and canyons. And underground you may even find soft dirt in which to lay cable. Then again, you might not.

“We have one big rock that covers a whole county,” said Josh Pettitte, manager of network operations and installation and repair for GVTC. “But we have accepted the geography. It's not a challenge anymore; it's just a way of life.”

But sometimes a way of life changes, and life has changed for GVTC over the last few years as it has worked to support its growth. It got high-tech with fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), consolidated operations and executed on a strategy Sorrells describes as “customer-focused, market-driven and performance-based.”

Sorrells spent 26 years at Alltel, starting straight out of college in the engineering group. He became vice president and general manager of wireline properties in Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. He then moved on to Sugarland, Texas, to manage Alltel's wireline business in Houston before coming to GVTC in June 2003.

With more competition in the offing and phenomenal growth in many of his territories, Sorrells and company embarked on their new strategy by consolidating their cable TV, telephony and security businesses — which had been operating as separate entities — revving up customer service and doing what many companies are still reluctant to do: bring fiber to the home.

“It was apparent to me that we had to provide more value — both market and product value — so we began integrating these various elements,” Sorrells said.

GVTC's territory spans 2000 square miles under the control of 11 different counties. It serves more than 30,000 customers with more than 42,000 access lines, although that is decreasing slightly as they are subsumed by the growth of DSL.

However, with about 25,000 lots of master-planned subdivisions being developed in various parts of its service area, Sorrells knew his company had to act fast to stay ahead of the rush and the competition.

“We realized with all this growth, we had one great opportunity to grab the future,” Sorrells said.

Not everyone saw that growth coming, said Paula White, president of the Greater Boerne Chamber of Commerce. “They knew the rate we were beginning to grow. Not a lot of companies did,” she said. “But they have been very responsive and are constantly working to offer new services.”

The city of Boerne (pronounced burr-nee) is the county seat of Kendall County in Texas. Last year Money magazine named it as the 48th best place to live in the U.S. It has tripled in size over the last decade and shows no signs of stopping. The county's population has blossomed to around 29,000.

That is one of the reasons GVTC targeted Boerne for its FTTH rollout, which began last month. Boerne also happens to be a looming battleground of competition. Verizon is the incumbent in parts of Boerne, Time Warner Cable is moving in, and there is long-time resident Kerrville Telephone Company with which to contend.

GVTC already has 700 to 800 people on its FTTH network. “There's a lot of greenfield opportunity out there with all the new growth,” Pettitte said. “But it's kind of a controlled growth. We are finding better ways every day to make installations more efficient.”

GVTC is being both aggressive and cautious. Eighty-five percent of its customer base has broadband access available and it has about a 27% percent take rate, which Sorrells said he's proud of. The company will continue to expand its fiber rollout as new subdivisions are built and existing copper facilities wear out.

To accomplish this, GVTC created a new organizational structure that includes a new vice president of network services, a new network operations center (NOC) run by Pettitte and a customer-facing support team that never loses sight of the opportunities for a sale.

“We decided we wanted to be a customer service company and not be anything short of that,” Sorrells said. “And all customer interfacing people are salespeople because we feel that in a competitive world, we had to commit to that.”

Sorrells said that a big part of what a co-op is all about is local representation, being in partnership with the community. “We view our commitment to fiber as a cooperative effort involving the leadership of a community,” he said.

The new organizational structure is helping GVTC with that commitment by capitalizing on the efficiencies gained through consolidation, executing on its customer service focus and bringing the latest technology to its customers. Sorrells sees that as GVTC's way of being part of the community.

White said they're succeeding. “They are very good corporate citizens,” she said. “They are being very proactive in helping with our growth, and we have an open line of communication with them about areas of concern. They are very receptive and responsive to that.”

GVTC also found a way to be the first business in the area to step up and give $10,000 to the new Kendall County Economic Development Fund. And it raised $65,000 in its inaugural charity golf tournament last year, which it gave to the Comal Public School Foundation. But lest we gush all over GVTC's philanthropy, the company's technology expansion and re-invigorated customer focus are doing plenty on their own to advance good will.

“There are lots of neat places to live and have your business, but having good technology and medical facilities makes a big difference and that has [historically] been a barrier,” White said.

Whether GVTC's fiber overlay is attracting San Antonio commuters or whether the flow of those commuters into the GVTC serving area is driving the demand for advanced services is unclear. As Sorrells said, it's probably a little of both. But with competition bearing down, those services also will need good support. That's Pettitte's job.

Pettitte came to GVTC by way of SBC Communications about a year and a half ago just as GVTC was opening its new NOC. The new NOC collapsed the management systems for four different departments into one location. There, his team formulated a new set of best practices, upgraded provisioning software, created a two-tiered support team and stretched the knowledge of those on the frontline to deal with multiple technologies.

The result? “We reduced our DSL troubles, for example, from 350 trouble reports per month in 2004 to about 100,” Pettitte said.

He also said that moving to an IP infrastructure for DSL has allowed GVTC to reduce provisioning delays and eliminate certain points of failure from the ATM backbone. And the inherent quality of fiber has helped operations get its failure rate on that part of the network below 1%.

Having overcome the challenges of rock and hill country, rural and expanding suburban sprawl, consolidating its operations, turning its workforce into a customer-focused sales machine and launching a FTTH network, all GVTC and its customers need now is a little rain.