Four County Electric Energizes Its Community with Extreme

Four County Electric Membership Corporation (FCEMC) is an electrical cooperative dedicated to providing reliable electric service to more than 35,000 customers in North Carolina. With more than 5,000 miles of overhead, underground, and transmission lines, FCEMC serves a diverse customer base including homes, farms, businesses and schools.

With so much relying on FCEMC in the region, the company’s IT team set out with a mission to build a “bulletproof network.” This included laying nearly 600 miles of fiber to build two main fiber rings and multiple substation fiber rings designed to create secure, resilient connectivity with built-in failover, so no one device or outage could take down the network. FCEMC partnered with Concise Networks and Extreme to develop a wired network infrastructure that would support their organizational goals.

FCEMC has been so successful in this project that not only have they been able to raise the level of dependability for their own network, they’ve also been able to transform into an internet service provider for the region. Alongside bringing electricity to their rural community, FCEMC is now able to extend its own network to provide high-speed connectivity to underserved areas, fostering community development and spurring economic growth. FCEMC’s ISP arm now powers a diverse group of organizations, ranging from sheriff’s offices and emergency management centers to businesses and schools.

The strategic deployment of both Extreme Universal Switches and SLX switches, in partnership with Concise Networks and Extreme, has allowed FCEMC to maintain a resilient, scalable, and secure network infrastructure that meets the evolving needs of its customers and community.

Challenges

• Network Reliability: Building a bulletproof network where no single device failure can cause downtime.
• Simplicity: Ensuring the growing network infrastructure remained easy to manage.
• Scalability: Managing a growing network infrastructure while maintaining high performance and reliability.
• Security: Protecting critical infrastructure and sensitive data, especially in light of increased threats to physical security.

Extreme Solutions

• ExtremeXOS Switches
• Universal Switches
• SLX Switches

Results

• A network that can be relied upon. FCEMC supports mission-critical services that its community depends on, without any drop-off in network performance or uptime.
• Strong backbone that gives FCEMC confidence they can tackle new projects or build additional services on the network. FCEMC supports its Advanced Meter Infrastructure off its network backbone.
• Support for security initiatives at a time when physical security of power transmissions is top of mind. FCEMC is able to add access control for security cameras at remote sites onto its Extreme network.