Rural Fiber Gets Its Big-Screen Moment With New NCTA Documentary (See It Here)

Action-packed, Pee-wee!

NCTA – The Internet & Television Association has produced a 20-minute documentary showcasing the challenges and perils cable crews face as they lay fiber in rural America.

In the doc, Every Last Mile: The Untold Story of Connecting Rural America , a Mediacom crew races against time and weather in frigid conditions to lay fiber in Lakewood Township, Minn, a community near Duluth with a population of around 2,000 people and an average annual snowfall of about 86 inches.

In Congress, Arizona, a Cox Communications crew faces extreme heat of up to 115 degrees, as well as challenging rock topography, as it tries to deliver high-speed internet for the first time to a seminal gold rush community.

And far north, in King Cove, Alaska, a community of 800 residents on the Aleutian Peninsula located 497 miles southwest of mainland Alaska, GCI crews struggle to avoid underground utilities which have locations that have not been precisely recorded.

“The film is being used to highlight both the importance and challenges of connecting every community to modern internet service,“ NCTA communications chief Brian Dietz told us Thursday. “We all know about the importance of reliable internet and how high-speed internet changes the lives of people, but we don’t often focus enough on the hard work required on the ground to bring this critical infrastructure to rural and remote communities that are still waiting to be connected. This docufilm captures that story.”