Nuvera President and CEO Glenn Zerbe stands at the reception counter with service agent Anna Fleck.

NEW ULM — Nuvera has come a long way from its beginnings 120 years ago as a telephone company started by a bunch of local retired farmers.

“It was a new kind of technology at the time done in front of the Grand Hotel,” Nuvera President and CEO Glenn Zerbe said. “Today we deliver state of the art fiber optic broadband to people’s homes and businesses. We’re one of the most prolific constructors of fiber broadband in southern Minnesota.”

Zerbe said Nuvera has made great strides in closing the digital divide for rural Minnesota, leveling the playing field between the rural communities and access to information and the metro area.

“We’re almost 70% fiber,” he said. “So that’s state of the art. That’s the most information, reliably, affordably that you can deliver to a home or a business possible today. The other 30% we serve with pretty capable service, maybe highly capable service, but not yet fiber. And we’re headed towards 80 or 90% coverage over the next few years as we continue to build.”

Zerbe said most of what Nuvera has done to date has been done without much in state and federal grants, though that could change soon he said due to an infrastructure bill passed under the Biden administration, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment bill (BEAD)..

“That’s going to help us close some of that, that last 30%,” he said. “So I think we’ve made good progress, still more work to be done, but I think we’re as far along in Minnesota and southern Minnesota as any place that you could find in the United States.”

Zerbe said Nuvera is an “ecosystem company” that has a little over 200 employees who work with hundreds of contractors around southern Minnesota.

“At any given time, especially in the summer when we’re constructing, there might be 3, 400, 500 people working on our behalf,” he said. “So we use a lot of contractors. The work we do is done with Minnesota based contractors.”

Zerbe said Nuvera is in almost two dozen communities now, with the primary ones being New Ulm, Hutchinson and Prior Lake.

Nuvera’s service range is north into Rice and Scott counties nearing the metro areas, west to Redwood and then over to Goodhue east. Nuvera is not currently in the Mankato area.

“So in this area we serve past 7,500 homes,” he said. “Almost 4,500 of them are customers of ours. And that number is growing. There’s another 3,000 or so in Springfield and Sleepy Eye, so there’s quite a concentration of homes around here.”

Zerbe said Nuvera is always looking for ways to deliver on a customer experience that is memorable and up to our expectations.

“We’ve been investing in customer experience models, customer portals, self help capabilities,” he said.

“But most of all, we’ve been using AI to predict and diagnose when you’re having what I call a good or a bad broadband day. If you’re having a bad broadband day, I want to know before you know, and today with some of the technologies I can know that.”

Zerbe said today the internet is not really an optional thing, and providing quality broadband service is what Nuvera is about, trying to help their customers move forward.

“We think of ourselves as ruthlessly local,” Zerbe said. “We’re here to stay local. Come see us in our local office, call us, we answer the phone or go online. If you like it, you don’t even have to talk to us and we’ll hook you up with whatever you need to be hooked up with. So, I like to think we’re both a modern and an old company at the same time.”