SLICFiber, a St. Lawrence County fiber-optic Internet company that traces its history back more than 120 years, is building out a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network through almost all of the north country — using pink cables to do it while donating a portion of each new installation’s fee to a local cancer charity.
Kevin Lynch, chief operating officer of SLICFiber, said the company wanted to do something long-term, visible and explicitly local, ensuring that all the money stays in the north country.
“We want to help people with anything they need to get through the hard times,” Lynch said. “This is something we plan on doing in perpetuity.”
That pink fiber-optic cable is a specialty for SLICFiber now, custom made by the company’s producer. All new installs after Feb. 4 — World Cancer Awareness Day — use the pink cabling from the utility pole to the building, with $25 from the installation fee donated to a cancer charity in the area.
SLICFiber, which started with the Nicholville Telephone Co., is actively expanding across the north country. The company just launched residential fiber-optic Internet service for the Watertown area at the start of March. Unlike the other legacy networks like Spectrum or Verizon that serve the region with a mix of fiber and coaxial cables or copper telephone wire, SLICFiber maintains an entirely fiber-optic network that makes the connections it offers faster.
Lynch said that the company has about 4,500 miles of fiber-optic cable laid across the region, with high-speed links to networking centers in Syracuse, Montreal and New York City that connect it with the globe-spanning Internet. Lynch said that fiber-optic networks don’t have upper limits on how much data they can transport. Several of the company’s main lines operate at speeds of 100 gigabits per second, which translates to 12.5 gigabytes of data transferred per second. Those links, Lynch said, can go much higher if needed, up to terabits of transmission per second.
“Our networks are designed with a very low over-subscription rate, and what that means is you don’t see that drag down that you might see on other networks when everyone gets home from school or work and starts streaming Netflix,” he said. “On fiber, you don’t notice that. You won’t get the pixelation, the slow loading, the buffering.”
SLICFiber has been expanding its business footprint as it has expanded its network footprint. Last year, SLICFiber bought Westelcom , the Watertown business-focused phone and internet provider. The company also recently acquired Crown Point Telecom in Essex County, and it has purchased other small local network companies in other parts of the region. Lynch said the company takes a deliberate approach to expanding, only moving on regions where it makes sense to expand based on customer needs and competition. When SLIC buys or moves into a region, the focus is on building up the fiber network.
The company’s original network, the Nicholville Telephone system, is roughly 98% transitioned to fiber, and the company is winding down operations at its copper wire production facility. The Crown Point Telephone, Keene Valley Video and Hamilton County Cable networks have also all been transitioned to fiber optics.
SLICFiber is expanding into regions that for decades have had only one option for phone or Internet service, in most cases reliant on coaxial or old-school telephone lines, or places where Internet service was never available. The company runs fiber-optic connections through the Adirondack Park, a region notorious for its lack of connectivity, and around some of the most sparsely populated parts of the state.
Lynch said he thinks SLICFiber has been able to build out this network where other companies have not because of a focus on competing and expanding.
“When you’re the sole provider in your area, your incentive to reinvest in your network and upgrade it is limited,” Lynch said. “We’re coming in as a digital-first company.”
FIBER'S UPSTATE NEW YORK ROOTS
Fiber optics has become the latest standard in ground-based networks. The technology uses a flexible glass or plastic fiber that is capable of transmitting light from one end to the other; laser beams of light are shot down the fiber and interpreted on the other side. Fiber-optic cables have a much higher transmission rate than metal-based wires, and research has focused on how to allow them to carry signals farther without requiring repeaters to boost the signal along its path.
The fiber-optic materials used for telecommunications were first developed in 1970 by a team of scientists at Corning Glass Works in Steuben County, Robert D. Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter C. Schultz.
Schultz lives in upstate New York, and has partnered with SLICFiber to promote their efforts. Last fall, Schultz spoke for SLICFiber at the Mechanicville Stillwater Chamber of Commerce annual economic summit, and he spoke with the Watertown Daily Times before that event.
“I worked with two physicists, and I was the materials guy,” Schultz said. “My job was making the glass, drawing it out into fibers and to do it without blowing up the lab.”
Schultz boasts that he only blew up the laboratory one time. After five years of focused research, the team created the right kind of glass fibers for use.
Schultz said the team had been working to create a fiber that lost 20 decibels per kilometer, a measurement of signal strength. That was about the same attenuation rate as copper wiring could provide, but required the team to produce a glass that was purer than had ever been produced before.
The team then set about trying to make the glass more manufacturable while improving signal strength. In 1972, they created germanium-doped silica fibers, which are now the standard fiber-optic cables used in telecommunications networks across the world. The pink cables being installed in the north country by SLICFiber, and the much larger cables that connect between communities, are all made of that material created by Schultz, Keck and Maurer.
More than 50 years since fiber optics grew from that lab in Corning, the transition is underway for such materials to become the backbone of the world’s communications networks. Schultz noted that despite having developed the technology, he’s never had a fiber-optic Internet connection at his home.
Schultz said it’s taken so long in part because no telecom company was comfortable giving Corning the power of being the only company capable of making their cables. Most telecom companies maintained their own copper mills and cable production lines, or contracted one of a number of production companies. But Corning was the only company capable, both technically and legally, of making the germanium-doped silica fibers.
In 1981, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. admitted it had infringed on the patents Corning held for the fibers, cementing the company’s authority to control the production of the fibers. To this day, Corning remains the largest producer of fiber-optic cables in the world.
Schultz noted that fiber optics were developed before the Internet was created, and well before personal computers became ubiquitous. As technology progressed through the 1980s and 1990s, companies started to install fiber-optic networks on their own, or use them for the base of networks that still had copper or coaxial cables on their edges.
“The internet was born in the early 1990s because of three key ingredients; fiber optics, laptop computers and user-friendly software,” he said.
Schultz himself tried to set up a fiber-optic network in the Adirondacks when he lived in Essex County in 2009. The network, CBN Connect, was a nonprofit that coordinated with local industrial development agencies, schools, medical centers and others to build out a loop of fiber optics that people could pay to connect to, an approach that’s been repeated with the Development Authority of the North Country’s fiber-optic network loop. Schultz’s network reached most of the major towns in the north country, but the finances didn’t work and the group shut down after only a few years.
He said he sees SLICFiber succeeding in a way that CBN Connect did not.
“We finally have a company that was able to develop the financial model and the ability to economically install fiber in these areas which are underserved, or unserved entirely,” he said.
Schultz said the creation of a truly high-speed network connecting the north country will bring with it enormous economic opportunities that would be felt across the region.
“Finally, after 55 years, I am glad to see we are getting fiber in the places where it should be,” he said.
©2026 Watertown Daily Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
