Glo Fiber Case Study: Buckeye Hills Regional Council
August 26, 2026 at 5:00 PM EST
Buckeye Hills Regional Council is a local council of governments established in 1968, serving an eight-county region in Appalachian Southeast Ohio. Operating with a lean, dedicated team of approximately 65 staff members who wear multiple hats daily, the organization coordinates critical resources and services across the region. It is organized into two primary operational divisions:
- Aging & Health: Designated as an Area Agency on Aging in Ohio, this division administers in-home care services, personal care, home-delivered meals, and medical transportation. These vital services are structured to keep senior citizens and disabled residents living independently in their homes, preventing premature transitions to assisted living or nursing facilities.
- Community Development: This division secures state, local, and federal funding, manages grant writing, and coordinates essential infrastructure initiatives, such as waterline extensions, road repairs, and sewer projects, from conception to final delivery.
Business Challenge
Delivering life-sustaining community services across Southeast Ohio involves navigating geographical challenges. In the rugged, hilly terrain of the Appalachian foothills, fiber-optic infrastructure is notoriously scarce and development lags far behind urban regions, leaving local organizations with limited broadband choices.
In mid-January 2026, Buckeye Hills faced a high-stakes transition when moving their headquarters to a new office location just outside Marietta, Ohio. Operating under an extremely compressed and rigid physical relocation schedule, the organization was charged with securing immediate, bulletproof voice and data services. Any prolonged transition delay would disrupt agency activities and paralyze the vital local social safety net.
For an agency managing regional welfare, network downtime is an operational crisis. Buckeye Hills relies daily on online state portals — particularly the Ohio Department of Aging application — to coordinate regional services and manage provider reimbursements. Many of these local service providers are small “mom-and-pop” healthcare and nursing operations. Lacking large cash reserves, these regional entities often operate on tight margins. If portal downtime delays Buckeye Hills' pass-through reimbursements by even a few days, these critical community providers face immediate cash flow bottlenecks and risk missing their weekly nurse payrolls.
When planning the relocation, the only alternative fiber vendor in the area was a national provider. Its engineering team conducted a site walkthrough and returned a proposal with high construction and installation costs, making it completely non-viable. Additionally, there were concerns about being locked into the national provider’s legacy ticketing systems, having experienced prior support situations where critical customer problems vanished into slow, automated queues with no direct human escalation path.
The Glo Fiber Business Solution
To resolve their relocation and reliability demands, Buckeye Hills migrated their services from the previous location with Glo Fiber Business, their trusted telecommunications partner of nearly seven years. Glo Fiber Business had been providing Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) as well as VoiP solutions. This high-stakes relocation served as a perfect opportunity to upgrade the agency’s primary data backbone. Working closely with a dedicated account manager, Buckeye Hills upgraded its network from a 300 Mbps connection at the old facility to a robust, high-performance 1 Gbps DIA circuit.
In addition to upgrading their primary voice and data circuits, Glo Fiber Business solved a critical state compliance hurdle. The State of Ohio Department of Aging requires an entirely separate, dedicated circuit to run the program applications that govern aging services. Glo Fiber successfully provisioned and managed this secondary, secure dedicated program circuit, ensuring full compliance and keeping the portal active.
Meeting the tight January relocation timeline required intensive, personalized project management. The on-site Glo Fiber team worked relentlessly, coordinating the technical schedules and beating the bushes to resolve any potential scheduling bottlenecks between construction teams, engineers, and installers. Their personal commitment and constant customer updates kept the transition on schedule.
On live-day, testing revealed a duplexing and provisioning mismatch that hindered initial connection speeds. The on-site team worked rapidly alongside technical engineering teams to isolate, diagnose, and resolve the issue on-site, successfully establishing stable gigabit performance. The GF provided direct phone numbers for support and the Network Operations Center (NOC), prioritizing immediate and transparent access to support.
“You tend to take connectivity for granted until it isn't there, but everything our IT department delivers relies entirely on that core backbone. Without Glo Fiber Business powering our voice and data circuits, our entire operational infrastructure stops working.”
— Jamie Lewis, IT Director, Buckeye Hills Regional Council
Results
The partnership achieved a highly successful, on-time office migration. The upgraded 1 Gbps DIA backbone provides Buckeye Hills' staff with flawless bandwidth, powering their daily VoIP communication, high-definition virtual meetings, and continuous data transfers without disruption. This absolute uptime protects the Southeast Ohio healthcare ecosystem. By ensuring reliable portal access, local nursing providers get paid on time, and weekly payrolls remain fully secure.
Furthermore, direct NOC communication allows the agency to obtain immediate, real-time regional outage ETAs. This transparent flow of information helps Buckeye Hills plan and initiate disaster recovery decisions proactively. The partnership’s high-touch integrity extended well past the physical move. When legacy site billing issues arose, the local Glo Fiber team personally advocated for Buckeye Hills, resolving the billing discrepancies and securing financial account credits.
“Finding true white-glove service in telecom is rare, but Glo Fiber Business consistently delivers it. Their team genuinely cares that we get what we pay for, and having people like that supporting our account makes all the difference.”
— Jamie Lewis, IT Director, Buckeye Hills Regional Council
Key Benefits:
- Significant Bandwidth Upgrade: Successfully scaled data capacity from a 300 Mbps pipe to a robust, dedicated 1 Gbps fiber circuit to support modern operations.
- Compliance and Security: Provisioned a secondary, secure dedicated circuit specifically required for State of Ohio Department of Aging program applications.
- Ecosystem Stability: Reliable connection uptime prevents billing delays, directly safeguarding the weekly payrolls of small local healthcare providers.
- Direct Human Support: Local support teams provide hands-on assistance, from the dedicated account representative, to the project manager, to the NOC.
- End-to-End Advocacy: Received active post-migration support to seamlessly resolve legacy billing issues and obtain financial credits.
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