MCNC Completes the Historic HERO Project: What 209 New Fiber Miles Mean for North Carolina Business

By Nicky Smith, Founder, Carolina Digital Phone  |  July 20, 2026  |  8 min read

Some announcements in this industry are press releases. This one is infrastructure you can stand on.

On July 15, MCNC announced the completion of its HERO Project, short for High-Speed Economies for Rural Opportunity. I want to explain what was built, why a hosted phone company in Greensboro considers it family news, and what it changes for a business owner in Sanford, Albemarle, or Jacksonville who has been told for years that real business internet was not coming to their road.

What did the HERO Project actually build?

Two fiber routes through the parts of the state that needed them most. The first runs 74 miles from Albemarle to Winston-Salem through central North Carolina. The second runs 135 miles from Sanford through Fayetteville to Jacksonville in the southeast. Together that is 209 new miles of middle-mile fiber, three new telecommunications huts, and access improvements reaching more than 350,000 housing units, nearly 5,000 previously unserved locations, and 696 community anchor institutions such as schools, libraries, hospitals, and public safety agencies across 11 counties.

The funding story is worth knowing too. When the federal Internet for All initiative launched in 2022, more than 235 applications competed nationwide for middle-mile funding, requesting over $5.5 billion. MCNC was the only research and education network in the entire country to win individual funding from the NTIA's middle-mile program. The Golden LEAF Foundation added matching funds, and MCNC invested its own money to finish the job.

MCNC President and CEO Tracy Doaks called the completion a milestone for making high-speed internet affordable and available across the state, and MCNC COO Tommy Jacobson made a point I think every rural business owner will recognize: the real impact lives in the spaces between towns, where the need for middle-mile infrastructure is greatest. The state's CIO, Nate Denny, tied it directly to education, health care access, and economic growth. They are all describing the same thing from different angles. Fiber in the ground is opportunity that does not wash away.

Why is a Greensboro phone company celebrating MCNC's news?

Because our voice traffic lives on that network. Carolina Digital Phone is an MCNC VoIP partner. One of our three geo-redundant data centers is colocated inside MCNC's Research Triangle Park facility, a Tier 3 data center on the NCREN backbone, and we maintain direct fiber connectivity from MCNC into our downtown Greensboro data center. When a school district in Wilkes County or a county office in Onslow makes a call on our platform, that call can ride private NCREN peering instead of the ordinary public internet.

That arrangement is why we talk about call quality with a straight face. Private peering means lower latency, fewer hops, and voice traffic that never has to fight consumer traffic for the same lane. Every mile MCNC adds makes that foundation stronger, and every telecommunications hut they stand up brings carrier-grade infrastructure closer to communities that used to be a long way from it.

There is a personal side to this as well. I have watched MCNC steward NCREN for decades, back when most people had never heard the word broadband. A nonprofit that puts $5.1 million of its own money into reaching places the market skipped is the kind of partner you want your phone calls riding on.

What does middle-mile fiber mean for your business phones?

A quick translation, because middle mile is one of those terms the industry uses without explaining. Think of internet infrastructure as a highway system. The last mile is the driveway to your building, usually owned by a local internet provider. The middle mile is the highway that driveway connects to. For years, rural North Carolina's problem was not only missing driveways. It was that the highway itself did not come close enough for any local provider to affordably build one.

HERO fixes the highway. MCNC's announcement notes that the expansion now enhances the affordability strategies of last-mile commercial providers in these communities. In plain terms: internet providers in these 11 counties can now reach a world-class backbone nearby, which makes it economical to extend real business-grade service to addresses that never had it.

And once the internet is real, everything we write about on this site becomes available to businesses that were locked out of it:

• Hosted VoIP becomes viable where dial tone used to mean aging copper. A cloud phone system needs dependable internet, and dependable internet is exactly what just arrived. Start with our guide to what hosted VoIP is and how it works.
• Business continuity gets easier. More routes and more huts mean more paths around a failure. Pair that with the failover planning in our business continuity phone guide and a rural office can ride out storms that used to mean silence.
• Schools and agencies gain direct benefits today. The 696 community anchor institutions on these routes connect through the same NCREN network our education and government customers already use, with room-level E911, paging, and the compliance features districts need.
• Remote and hybrid work stops being a city privilege. A softphone app is only as good as the connection under it. Better middle mile means an employee in a small Chatham County town can answer the business line as clearly as one in downtown Raleigh.

A note from someone who has watched this network grow

How Carolina Digital Phone connects your business to this network

For more than 25 years, Carolina Digital Phone has been the trusted local source for telephone, business messaging, and AI Receptionist services across the Carolinas. Our platform runs on three geo-redundant data centers, in downtown Greensboro, in MCNC's Research Triangle Park facility, and in Dallas, with backup power tested weekly and a 99.99 percent uptime target. For schools, colleges, and government agencies, private NCREN peering through MCNC gives voice traffic a managed path built for public institutions.

If the HERO Project just changed what is possible at your address, the next step is a conversation, not a contract. Call (336) 544-4000 and a North Carolina pre-sales engineer will look at your location, your current phone setup, and what the new infrastructure makes possible. Schools and government agencies can reach our dedicated team at (336) 543-0000.