Montgomery County and the Kingdom Telephone Company reached a lease agreement to place equipment on a tower to improve coverage within the county.

The tower is located on Bader Road in Big Spring and has been in that location for many years. It is owned by Kingdom, which is located in Auxvasse.

“Back in the day, we would use microwave radios to backhaul voice traffic,” Kingdom interim CEO/general manager Caleb Pashia said. “Now that we have an all-fiber network, that’s not really important anymore. So we kind of got this underutilized asset. The county reached out to us, basically asking about co-locating equipment up there. We said, ‘Heck, yeah. Let’s do it.’ They have some needs for modernizing their 911 system and getting better communications to their field people via radio. Radio is tough where you have hills and trees.”

2nd District Commissioner Doug Lensing said with the lease agreement, there will be better coverage in towns such as Big Spring, Americus and Rhineland and the Montgomery County Joint Communications Center will be able to fix some coverage areas for radios.

“It’s kind of a happy accident,” Lensing said. “They did the studying and figured out where it was at and that tower just happened to be available. It’s going to help everybody and it’s a lot cheaper than building our own. It’s a win-win-win for everybody. Kingdom wins because somebody else is going to take care of the tower and they’re going to get a little bit of revenue off of it. The county wins so they don’t have to build a very expensive tower. The people win because now they’re going to have better coverage for the ambulance, sheriff’s and fire departments.”

Pashia, who has been working at Kingdom for almost 15 years, said the telephone company works with the county in other ways, such as providing service to the Montgomery County Courthouse.

“We’re local, so we love working with local entities whether they are businesses in the county or local government,” Pashia said. “We’re cooperative, so we’re here to provide services to the people and the places that we live. Anytime you can do something like that, that’s pretty cool. It’s very rewarding for us.”