For many years, Surry County’s administrative employees — as well as the agencies they supported, such as the school board, sheriff’s office, and circuit courts — relied on traditional telephony infrastructure. Delon Brown, Surry County’s IT Director, explains that the region’s rural nature meant phone service options and capabilities were extremely limited.
“Surry County has been called a broadband desert because we’re rural, out of the way, and cover a huge geographic footprint,” Delon says. “Because it’s difficult and expensive to provide IT communications to an area like ours, we had only a few choices of carriers and services.”
Prior to the pandemic, and just before Delon joined the team, Surry County migrated to a VoIP phone system. “When that system worked, it was fine. But it had limitations in functionality — like the ability for us to easily make adjustments to our employees’ phone services. And the big shortcoming was that it basically offered no ability to telework.”
When the COVID lockdowns went into effect, and Surry County’s employees were forced to vacate their offices, the administration quickly realized how detrimental it could be if government employees were inaccessible to the county’s residents — particularly at such a difficult time as the pandemic.
“Our Department of Social Services had to keep functioning,” explains Delon. “These are the people fielding child-care assistance requests and providing nutritional assistance to at-risk families. We did our best to equip these employees with mobile services and to forward office calls to their homes or cell phones. But that solution didn’t scale — and I knew we could never again afford to be in a position like this, where our essential workers didn’t have the communication tools they needed to serve the people counting on them.”
