GREAT FALLS — Montana based Vision Net was founded in 1995 with the goal of providing advanced distance learning and internet for rural schools in the Treasure State.
In the following 25 years, they’ve expanded to become the state’s largest network, but they’re early focus on video conferencing has brought the company full circle to their original mission during the COVID-19 crisis.
The pandemic has forced many schools to adopt remote learning, and for many businesses to implement work-from-home practices. Vision Net has seen an increase in traffic across their network, but had the infrastructure in place to meet the rising demand.
“Our network was optimized really well to handle this,” said Vision Net operations manager Gary Evans. “We definitely saw traffic pattern changes during the COVID crisis when everyone started migrating to ‘work-at-home’ and remote learning. It had a fairly significant impact but it’s built to handle the increase. We were in a very good position for this.”
Evans says COVID-related traffic has plateaued, but Vision Net is still planning to build more fiber network in larger cities like Helena and Billings to handle more clients and more traffic.
