Nicholville Telephone Company CEO Mark Dzwonczyk recently served as an expert panelist at the 2015 Broadband Communities Summit in Austin, Texas.

As part of a panel from across the country discussing “Lessons from Successful Broadband Deployments,” Dzwonczyk discussed some of the challenges and approaches from his experience guiding Slic Network Solutions, a subsidiary of Nicholville Telephone, through an 800-mile fiber-to-the-home network expansion.

Recently surpassing the 5,000 subscriber milestone, the company offers voice, data and video services.

Amidst the Federal Communication Commission’s recent definition of “broadband” as Internet download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second (Mbps), large scale deployments of broadband infrastructure such as Slic Network Solutions’ expansion will become more commonplace throughout the United States, according to a press release from Slic.

This is especially true in rural New York due to Gov. Cuomo’s announced goal of connecting every resident in the state with Internet speeds of up to 100Mbs -- four times the federal requirement for a service to be called broadband -- in the next four years, the release said.

Dzwonczyk’s comments addressed key themes common to these expansions for rural areas nationwide, including:

• The premise that rural broadband is as critical to economic development and quality-of-life as rural electrification was nearly 100 years ago.

• Local providers, like Slic, are key enablers to achieving broadband goals because they bring an understanding of deployment issues, from construction of fiber optic lines to adoption in communities that were previously unserved.