Municipal Connectivity Partnerships in Washington and Oregon
Join The Light Speed Broadband Ecosystem
Connected Communities
Our vision is to connect rural communities to advanced technologies. Since the beginning, our priority has been to provide service before profit, often investing resources in the communities we serve without immediate financial returns. Our robust, dense data network is purpose built for the Northwest. Every quarter, we add more miles of infrastructure to connect non-metro areas with carrier-grade services tailored to our customer’s needs.
Let’s Partner To Get Your Town Connected
If you’re a mayor, city manager or other stakeholder in rural Oregon or Washington, we invite you to contact us. In some cases, we can help you with the paperwork to apply for state, federal and other funding, we can package “pave-the-path” like-kind exchanges and we can work with you on system design. We’re a fiber optic network design/build firm AND an ISP which gives us end-to-end expertise in network expansion to your town, your businesses and your constituents.
Bridging The Digital Divide
In early 2019, LS Networks completed a $2 million project connecting Maupin, Oregon to LSN’s best-in-the-west fiber optic network. The project brings blinding ONE GIG speeds to Maupin’s 430 residents at prices unheard of nationally. “The new network in Maupin is proof that no town is too small or too remote to connect to cutting edge broadband,” said Governor Kate Brown. “It will allow businesses and individuals in Maupin to grow and add new jobs while helping the school, health care providers, and local government to provide quality services.
Spotlight
Emerald People’s Utility District Gets More for Less with LS Networks
10 years ago, fiber was a rare commodity and an expensive technology. Since then, it’s become more affordable, gotten much faster, and has obsoleted other internet infrastructures. Emerald PUD, an electric utility provider in Lane County, Oregon, knew this fact and suspected it was paying more for what it could get from its sole internet service provider (ISP).
Emerald also had just 24 phone lines to service users – an insufficient amount to handle the job during power outages when they often received over a 1,000 calls. Additionally, disparate communication systems made resolving IT issues quite challenging. The company was looking for:
- Faster internet speeds
- More phone lines
- Better pricing on both
Greater Yakima Chamber of Commerce
Historically, the chamber operated internet services through an inconsistent phone line. It was normal to reset the router every week or need to walk away and grab lunch when the system needed to sync to Dropbox. Now, downtown Yakima has high-speed internet for the first time, offering reliable, secure connections. “Working with LS Networks helps us not only keep our costs down, but helps us further our mission to build successful businesses in Yakima County,” said Thane Phelan, Vice President of the Greater Yakima Chamber of Commerce. “Our experience with LS Networks has been practically flawless — from a business relationship and internet delivery perspective. Believe me, it’s made a difference for our business and our community and we highly recommend working with them.”
The City of Millersburg, OR Implements Comprehensive Upgrades to Their Digital Communication Systems
“When I came on board as City Manager,” according to Kevin Kreitman, “the City of Millersburg was in dire straights when it came to our communication systems. Our phone systems were outdated and hardware upgrades would have been outrageously expensive. Our Internet was slow and unreliable, and too often down. It was so bad, we couldn’t get software upgrades for our financial software without the downloads timing out, or the update files being corrupted
upon download.
