About the EIDNet

In 1994, the Eastern Irrigation District was looking into obtaining internet access for its main office. At the time, there were no internet providers for people who lived in the Eastern Irrigation District. What they found was that it would be easier to become an Internet Service Provider to its rural water users than to just get an internet connection for themselves. The EIDNet went live with 16 dial-up connections in June of 1995 and shortly afterwards the dial-up service expanded to 32 lines and eventually up to 64 lines.

As access to the internet grew, so did the requirements of the users of the EIDNet. It soon became apparent that dial-up was no longer "cutting it" for most users. The EIDNet then researched other options, because once again none of the "big providers" were interested in the small rural areas like ours. In June of 2004 we started providing high speed wireless internet to our customers through a series of 12 towers. Within a couple of years the number of towers had grown to 18 and we were serviceing the majority of the County. In November of 2008 the last of the dial-up lines were shut down as most of our customers had switched to the higher speed wireless offerings.

Recently, with all of the video, music and high bandwidth services available on the internet, the demand for more bandwith increased. With that in mind, the EIDNet expanded its staff, broke from its original partner and took on the job of becoming a stand alone service provider. The changes started in October of 2009 when the EIDNet went live with its own 100mb fibre optic feed. We then upgraded equipment at all of our tower sites, including the backhaul feeds between tower sites. These changes allowed us to provide a faster, more stable service to our users as well as larger variety of service plans. The last change is an upgrade to all the existing users of the EIDNet system that will let them enjoy the increased options we are making available.