Emery Telcom will offer telephone service as a stand-alone option or as part of a variety of discount-priced packages featuring all three services, said Brock Johansen, the company’s CEO and general manager.
“We’re excited to provide these options to Moab residents,” Johansen said. “There are some advantages to customers to have our services and have it all in one place and on one bill.”
Johansen said the company will offer digital voice service “with all the traditional calling features,” including caller ID and call waiting, and the company has acquired local exchange status and signed an inter-connection agreement with Frontier so that Emery Telcom telephone users in Moab will continue to be able to place local calls at no charge, even to Frontier customers. Long-distance calling plans are also available, he said.
In the past several years, Emery Telcom has installed a fiber-optic route that now connects Moab to Salt Lake City, Utah, enabling the company to provide customers with Internet speeds up to 40 megabytes. Packages featuring 1 megabyte and 5 megabyte Internet speeds are also available, he said.
The company is also in the process of installing fiber-optic lines throughout Moab’s downtown business corridor and plans to extend those lines to businesses located near Main Street, Johansen said.
“We wanted to make sure we had a really robust fiber product, so we’re putting fiber down the Main Street corridor and building off that to also offer the service to nearby businesses,” he said. “That’s going to allow us to give business customers more options.”
Emery Telcom also plans to include a local broadcast television station through its cable service. That station will broadcast some local news, he said. The company also hopes to offer live broadcasts of Grand County High School sports events, beginning with football this fall, he said.
Emery Telcom is a nonprofit co-operative established by Emery County residents in 1950 to build a telephone network in the rural areas of the county. Since that time, the company has expanded its services to include Internet, cable television, long distance, computer and electronics services, and various telecommunications-related business services. In 2001 Emery Telcom purchased the Qwest telephone systems in Carbon County and Hanksville. In 2009, Emery Telcom purchased the cable television plants in Carbon, Emery, Grand, and San Juan counties, Johansen said.
“We’re locally based in central Utah, and we have offices in all of our communities,” he said. “We want people to understand that we also live in the communities we service.”
The company has an office in Moab located at 56 East 100 South. For more information, contact the office at 435-259-8521.