TelAlaska: remotely serving rural Alaska.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Corporate 100

Can we bring Internet service to some of the United States' most rural and difficult to reach communities? Of course we can! Can we provide vital cellular telephone service to customers who might need it to save their lives? Of course we can!

TelAlaska's motto is "At TelAlaska, of course you can," and it speaks to the company's willingness to provide customized solutions for its customers as it has for more than four decades. But it also harkens to the business's efforts to provide 21st century service in remote communities. These efforts, according to the company's CEO, are getting more difficult today with changing federal priorities.

TelAlaska is a full-service telecommunications company with about 75 employees. It has been operating in Alaska since 1968. The Rhyner family began the business as Interior Telephone Co., providing telephone service in Fort Yukon. The Ryner's tale is a classic Alaska small business story of vision, opportunity and ingenuity.

"They were actually using equipment that came from the (1967) Fairbanks flood," says President and CEO Brenda Shepard. The family cleaned up office equipment in their basement, according to information from past CEO Jack Rhyner's family, and put it to use, dug holes for their own telephone poles and built the infrastructure themselves. All this to provide service to a community that previously shared a single phone line located at the Fort Yukon airport, according to the Rhyner family.

Over the years, Shepard says, the Rhyner family methodically expanded their coverage area, picking up communities on the Aleutian chain and elsewhere. In 1992 the company, which had since changed its name to TelAlaska, purchased Mukluk Telephone Co. on the Seward Peninsula and began serving 13 new communities around Nome, including Little Diomede Island. More purchases followed, including a deal in 2000 to take over GTE, which served Seward and Moose Pass on the Kenai Peninsula.

American Broadband, a rural telephone provider operating in Nebraska, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas, bought TelAlaska from the Rhyner family in 2008, and although the company's corporate office is in North Carolina, it makes locally based operations a priority and, on its web page, American Broadband cites an emphasis on "local management control."

Today the company serves about 15,000 accounts in 25 communities and its coverage area includes Nome and Fort Yukon, the Aleutian Chain and many spots between. According to the company's...