You might think many rural providers would be using WiMAX to bring wireless broadband to their hard-to-reach areas. You might be wrong.

Cameron, Wis.-based Chibardun Telephone Cooperative is one of the few. Chibardun (pronounced Sh-bard-dun) is reaching homes scattered throughout the hills and woods of northwest Wisconsin, just north of Eau Claire, through its CTC subsidiary. WIMAX is just one method it is using, but it is the fastest-growing part of the company's business.

Rick Vergin, CEO of Chibardun, said the company is breaking new ground in the independent market. “The ultimate thing for us is to get fiber to the home, but until that happens we need something in between,” he said.

CTC was launched in 1996 as one of the first facilities-based CLECs and extended Chibardun services to Barron, Chetek and Rice Lake, Wis. It was a C Block winner back in 2002 and now has five towers running wireless broadband mostly over the 700 MHz band, with a little 900 MHz mixed in for good measure.

The company bundles its broadband access service with its wireless voice-over-IP (VoIP) service for $44.95 per month and calls it Access Plus. Not WiMAX, not wireless or wireline — just access. Access Plus.

CTC went operational with Soma Networks' 700 MHz band FlexMax system in August of last year. While the broadband speeds of 1.5 Mb/s download and 256K upload can't match cable or DSL access technologies, Vergin said he is very happy with the service, especially the coverage and the ability to support VoIP.

“We found out early on in this game that if you just run regular VoIP over your layered broadband, it eats up a lot of capacity.” Vergin said. He added that Soma's proprietary method significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.