History
Whidbey Telephone was founded in 1908 by local business owners and farmers in Langley, Washington. They wanted to provide telephone service to the community but wanted to keep the ownership local to prevent an outside company from interfering in the affairs of the Whidbey Island community. All residents of South Whidbey had access to the Whidbey Telephone system by 1920. The company prospered, but after World War II an influx of new residents began to tax the small phone company. By 1950, the company began to make major upgrades to its network but began to lose money. A white knight appeared in the form of David C. Henny. In 1953, Henny purchased a controlling interest in Whidbey Telephone Company. Under his leadership, the company was able to restructure and become profitable again, all the while completing much needed upgrades to the infrastructure. The Henny family still controls the company.
Winters in Washington bring many storms, Whidbey Telephone had overhead wires, and when the storms came, the lines went down. After several winters, where more than 60% of their customers lost service, the company decided to bury its entire network. By 1961, 100% of its lines were buried, a first for local telephone companies. Since then there has yet to be a widespread service disruption due to infrastructure damage.
Whidbey Telephone became the first local phone company (west of the Rocky Mountains) to provide Internet access to its customers, in 1994. In 2000, while many phone companies were just beginning to offer DSL services, Whidbey began an aggressive campaign to provide the service to all of it customers. In just two years, the entire service area, including Point Roberts and Hat Island had DSL service available. For a few years, the company's Internet division, Whidbey.NET, even offered DSL to residents in Verizon territory on Whidbey Island. The service was a failure, due in part to aggressive marketing and disinformation provided by Verizon. To this date, there are large portions of North Whidbey that do not have access to DSL (or other high-speed Internet services) because of this failure.
Read more about this topic: Whidbey Telecom
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