STEHEKIN – This remote mountain lake community has suddenly become less remote.
Without fanfare, Chelan-based WeavTel last month began offering residential and business telephone service to the lower Stehekin Valley, an area formerly reachable only by costly satellite or radio phones.
“I, for one, am very excited about it,” said Randall Dinwiddie, owner of the Silver Bay Resort in Stehekin, one of the new subscribers who pay $25 a month for residential service or $35 for business telephones.
The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission last week approved a settlement granting WeavTel $253,272 a year to offset costs of providing phone service to Stehekin, a wilderness gateway at the west end of Lake Chelan accessible only by boat or floatplane.
WeavTel is using a combination of wireless technology and underground lines to provide service.
When surveyed, many of the 100 year-round Stehekin residents said they didn’t want a telephone disrupting their daily lives.
But Dinwiddie is not among them.
Guests were surprised they couldn’t call home to check on the welfare of relatives, he said.
“From that point of view, I’m really happy this is happening,” he said.
Dinwiddie has a satellite phone, and some residents also have radio phones, but those options are too expensive for some. The satellite phone costs about $120 a month, plus several hundred dollars in equipment, he said.
The new telephones offer a less-expensive alternative, he said.
“It’s not like all of the sudden there’s a ringy-dingy sound on someone’s deck,” he said. “This is just another page in many attempts to provide phones in Stehekin.”
Rick Weaver, WeavTel’s manager of operations, said “more than three but fewer than 10” people have signed up so far for his company’s service.
The company expects to hook up more phone lines in the next week. Within two years, it expects that at least 70 telephones will be connected in Stehekin homes and businesses.
The annual subsidy comes from two pools given to any phone company offering service in areas where providing service would otherwise be too expensive.
Bob Shirley, the commission’s telecommunications analyst, said nearly every telephone in north-central Washington, except those in the Wenatchee area, is subsidized through a state or federal fund.
Weaver said he was so busy testing the system he didn’t think to take photographs of his customers making some of the first calls using regular phones last month.
Roy Zipp, a National Park Service natural resource specialist, said WeavTel also is seeking a special use permit to use federal land for a satellite downlink and underground fiber-optic lines to offer the service in the upper Stehekin Valley.
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