Growing up can present physical and emotional challenges, as each of us can attest and Ciello, REC’s telecom business, has not been exempt from those challenges. A bit of history— in 2012, REC investigated the idea of starting into the telecom business to bring world class Internet and phone service to Valley residents. After a more than year long study of the idea, Ciello was created and fiber optic infrastructure started to be deployed to bring those services to homes and businesses. From the beginning, REC’s and Ciello’s commitment was, and still is, to provide fast, reliable and cost-effective Internet access and full featured phone service to every resident of the San Luis Valley.
Over the past 5+ years, Ciello has built out hundreds of miles of fiber optic lines and deployed wireless infrastructure to bring Internet and phone services to almost 5,000 Valley residents. A few weeks ago, in mid-May, some of our core servers became overwhelmed with the many new customers recently added as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With all the stay-at-home orders, everyone wanted Internet access immediately. One week in early April, Ciello received as many requests for service as were received in the whole month of March. Most of the requests were for students now forced to attend class online. REC employees made incredible efforts to get everyone – students, work-at-home people, businesses forced to conduct online ordering – all now in desperate need of connectivity installed and running as quickly as possible.
As the Ciello business has grown, substantial investments have been made in equipment upgrades and redundant connections to Internet core “points of presence” to ensure uptime and data throughput is sufficient for all customers. Remembering back to the Spring Fire on La Veta Pass almost two years ago, Ciello was virtually the only telecommunication provider in the Valley still up and running. Ciello continues to enhance its core network capacity and reliability, but the surge in recent weeks for connectivity due to the pandemic was simply a matter of too much, too fast. Our network engineers, telecom technicians and all REC employees are working to build a robust network that will provide you with outstanding service.
To all our customers who lost connectivity in mid-May, I want to say I understand your frustration at missing family, school or business events and get-togethers. Ciello remains committed to providing outstanding Internet and phone services and is working diligently and as fast as is possible to continue building the infrastructure needed. Ciello is also working to roll out additional features on Internet services that will bring many more value-added capabilities to your Internet experience.