Congratulations, also, to all our prize winners! And, as usual, our caterer, Sue Reynolds, served a delicious buffet for members to enjoy. Superb as usual.

By charter, the annual meeting is to be held on the second Tuesday in April, each year, and the attendance is growing. Next April will be a special time for all MonCre members. 2004 will be a hallmark year, marking our 50th anniversary of service to MonCre members. You’ll be hearing about our plans to celebrate later on in the year.

The past year has been a very busy one at MonCre. In our desire to try to bring ever better service and facilities to our customers, MonCre made a decision to change our vendor of Internet services and support. We feel that our dial-up support services are much stronger with our new vendor than before. We’ll be looking at ways to offer more and even better services to you in the coming months.

DSL is alive and well at MonCre, and we are pleased to have this service available for you. Almost all of our remote locations are now equipped for DSL service—so no matter where you live in our service area, we should be able to provide you with high-speed Internet service, utilizing DSL.

You will also be pleased to hear that you now have the availability of a local full time person to assist you with problems related to the Internet and DSL. Contact Greg Knighten, our Internet Coordinator, to help with any problems or situations you may incur. Greg, along with our Internet Customer Service Representative, Donna Swords, will be available to assist you in setting up your broadband or dial-up Internet services.

MonCre continues to grow. We are busy building additional facilities to accommodate current growth and to make sure we will have the infrastructure in place when our customers require service. We haven’t yet seen a great impact on our service area from the introduction of the new Hyundai plant. It’s a little early. However, as construction nears completion and new employees arrive in the area, we may indeed experience a surge in customer growth. Here at MonCre, we are ready to do whatever is necessary to accommodate such growth; in fact, we’re looking forward to it.

Watch for future updates of our progress. We are on the move!

Jerry McGee
General Manager
MonCre Telephone Cooperative