Ringing In the New Year

Celebrating 2024’s Accomplishments & Looking Forward to 2025

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and enjoyed your time with friends and family. Now, we’re at a moment to contemplate all we achieved in 2024 and resolving to achieve new goals in the next 12 months.

As I consider all that Eastex has achieved over the last year, I am once again overwhelmed with gratitude for our staff and colleagues who have worked tirelessly to make our co-op successful. Over this past year, our team continued our mission to bring fiber internet connections to every corner of our remote East Texas service area. While we are not done yet, we have made significant progress, and in 2024 we saw our first exchange area where every single customer converted to fiber. That is an exciting achievement because it means people are embracing the many benefits of fiber broadband service.

We haven’t just been building out fiber, either. This past year, we fought intense flooding and hurricane-strength storms to keep services powered and functioning, even while employees’ homes and our own offices flooded. It never ceases to amaze me how our employees rise up to meet challenges like these, and I’m incredibly proud of our team’s dedication and commitment.

Eastex also deployed new tools to upgrade our network and improve our customers’ experience. We rolled out a chat feature on our website to allow customers to message us, both in English and Spanish. We developed broadband labels to empower you to be smarter shoppers when you evaluate internet service options. We added our fiber information to real estate databases to help homebuyers know which homes have essential and value-adding fiber access. We strengthened network resiliency with additional 911 emergency call routes. We implemented new robocall mitigation tools to help reduce those unwanted calls. Eastex also became a Smart Rural Community provider, enhancing our ability to partner with the communities we serve and advance economic development initiatives. And those are just a few highlights! 2024 was productive, to be sure.

With a new year upon us the work continues, and our mission, as always, is critical—to ensure our customers have at least the same level of connectivity and service as urban customers have in the big cities. That’s why we will continue building out fiber until every customer has access to scalable gig-plus internet service, and we will continue to implement enhancements to our organizational and customer service processes. We also resolve to continue to advocate for rural broadband, to make sure rural voices are represented and heard where decisions are being made at state and federal levels because of rural matters.

May your 2025 be filled with joy. Thank you for letting us serve you.