Armadillos may have once outnumbered people in the Texas Hill Country, but the times have been changing at the speed of light, especially for one local telephone cooperative.

Long ago, back when Ma Bell was first setting up dial tones around the U.S., she skipped over sparsely populated areas like the Guadalupe River Valley, which had to fend for themselves and set up their own rural telephone cooperatives. Around that time, the customer-owned GVTC, set up shop as the main provider of phone service in two areas outside of San Antonio.

Later on, when cable TV and then the Internet came along, the Hill Country and other rural regions in the US fell even further behind the networks deployed in the cities and suburbs.

But now, as San Antonio and other Texas cities continue to grow, the Hill Country armadillos have a lot more company. And GVTC has been taking advantage of the growth trend to secure its position as a 21st Century full-service telecommunications provider. And local residents are finding that they are better off for it.

Over the past seven years the population of 14 counties in the heart of the Hill Country has grown by a total of more than a quarter million people. At 19.4 percent, the region's growth has been outpacing the rest of Texas by four percentage points. Four of those same counties grew faster than 20 percent, while the population of Hays County, once quietly nestled between Austin and San Antonio, grew by more than 41 percent.

Many of these new settlers have Texas-sized appetites for high-speed internet, cable and phone service packages – the so-called "triple play." And therein GVTC has found opportunity. The cooperative has been busy installing fiber optic lines directly to its subscribers’ homes and businesses, thereby enabling GVTC to boast the fastest speeds available (up to 8mbps down/768kbps up), which well exceed what's needed for online interactive gaming, video conferencing, high-definition television and streaming Internet media.

GVTC has ridden the fiber optic wave to become the largest telephone cooperative in Texas. Its service area spans 2,000 square miles and eleven counties and includes over 31,000 customers with approximately 42,000 access lines.

Fiber to the home (FTTH) technology, the latest and best technology for connecting subscribers to telecommunications services, is presently capable of providing transmission speeds greater than 20 to 30 times faster than copper-based DSL or cable modem. New homes and developments are being outfitted for fiber optic cable that not only starts out as a valuable amenity, but continues to grow in value as new technologies keep finding ways to provide more services over the huge bandwidth available over optical fiber.

Nationwide, the number of households with a direct fiber-to-the-home connection recently passed two million, and much of the growth is in rural areas.

“It’s the rural providers and the small cooperatives like us that are in a better position than anybody to install and offer state-of-art high-bandwidth fiber to every door in their towns,” said Jeff Mnick, GVTC Vice President of Sales and Marketing, “We’re about to see a huge chunk of our region catch up, maybe surpass, the bigger cities when it comes to communications connectivity.”

In the coming years, tens of thousands of homes are expected to be built in the 11 counties where GVTC operates, and public services, business and tourism are expected to keep growing for years. The growth can be seen everywhere, from downtown shops to the growing numbers and sizes of the local festivals. Even Hill Country wineries, a small but tenacious local industry dating back to German settlers, are now putting towns like Fredericksburg and Boerne on vintners' maps. Burgeoning awareness of the area as a forge of American culture and ideas – particularly its influences in food, beer, architecture, and music – is drawing people from all over Texas and the U.S. to the Hill Country as a destination of choice.

Since getting its statewide video franchise in 2005, GVTC has been adding more services to its menu, remaking itself as a provider of fiber-driven triple- and quadruple-play (by adding home security) services to long-time customers as well as all the new homes sprouting up in the area. All the while, GVTC has remained true to its roots as a cooperative.

"We do have one critical advantage as rural communications supplier in a high-growth area," Mnick said, "Unlike our urban competitors, we have a lot of home and office construction, and running the fiber into those buildings is a lot easier than trying to build over an existing copper-based network. From day one, we can offer a next-generation network that is future-proof because we run fiber all the way to the premise.”

"I'm thinking it's because we jumped at the right time -- that's why we're holding our own against the bigger players," Mnick said.

It's no surprise GVTC's products are a hot sell. Suddenly, Texans no longer have to choose between living among the local charms and scenic beauty of the Hill Country and having access to the bandwidth of big cities like San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Using GVTC's next-generation broadband connection, central Texas telecommuters can connect, even video conference, between their homes and their distant offices – sometimes at speeds that beat even their office connection.

“You’ll access your files and run applications as fast as if you’re at work, and firewalls won’t slow you down, either,” Mnick said. “You can stay home and out of the traffic more often, or commute at non-peak hours. You can take care of a sick child without missing a day’s work.”

While he’s not sure whether these telecommunications advances are spurring growth or merely happening because of it, Mnick does believe that they will actually temper the impact of change on his area in the long run.

“Fiber is what’s going to keep small co-ops and providers independent and competitive,” he says. “It’s what’s going to keep the big sharks at bay, letting small-town residents have more say over what services they want, what programs and movies they’ll get to watch, what specific broadband capabilities their businesses, town councils, high school football fans and orchid clubs want. I guess it’s kind of ironic, but in this way fiber to the home is actually doing a lot to keep Hill Country life what it's always been about.”