The Thundercloud plan

Thundercloud, Inc. is a West Virginia nonprofit corporation Section 501 (c)(4) organized and operated for the promotion of the social welfare of communities in West Virginia. Thundercloud’s goal is to deploy high-capacity broadband in a broad regional network that reaches underserved areas, boosts economic development, and connects hospitals, schools, libraries, police and fire departments, EMS, and anchor institutions including Marshall University. Thundercloud will improve broadband access to businesses and residents in the 9-county Advantage Valley region of West Virginia by helping businesses retain workers, expand business investment and jobs, and diversify with high-speed broadband.

Thundercloud’s principal product will be a robust, fault-tolerant Dark Fiber infrastructure, or “Middle Mile Infrastructure”, with a service range of from 100 Megabit per second to 40 Gigabit per second. The overall network will consist of approximately 585 route miles [total linear length] of fiber optic cable, with an average fiber count of 144 strands of advanced Single-Mode Fiber. The primary users will be public and government institutions, healthcare, and last-mile service providers of various types. With an average fiber count of 144 strands and an estimated route mileage of 585 miles, the network will provide a total “Fiber Mile” distance of approximately 84,240 miles of new, state-of-the-art infrastructure. The network is designed as a ring topology to provide full redundancy and fault tolerance.