A Lightcurve technician works on extending the network for fiber-optic lines to a residential area in Centralia.
Photos courtesy of Lightcurve
Lightcurve this year has substantially completed its infrastructure expansion into residential areas of Centralia and Chehalis, installing fiber-optic networks for improved high-speed internet, streaming TV, and voice services.
“We have built fiber into several thousand homes passed in Centralia and Chehalis,” Anand Vadapalli, president and CEO of Lightcurve, said in an interview last week, referring to the term used in the industry to describe locations covered by a network.
With fiber optics now passing by several thousand homes in the Lewis County communities, people can sign up for service and have a line installed from the street’s main fiber line to their home, referred to as a “drop.”
Vadapalli expects the two cities’ residential passings to be completed later this month or early October.
Tacoma-based Lightcurve, which was Rainier Connect before Palisade Infrastructure bought its parent company in fall 2023 and rebranded, has served business customers in the Lewis County cities for more than a decade, “but this is really our first time going into serving residential customers, and so the network is all new in Centralia and Chehalis,” he said.
Lightcurve has been busy getting the word out about its new residential fiber-optic service, including visiting homes door to door.
The company also will be upgrading service in Yelm, in Thurston County southeast of Olympia, starting in 2026, Vadapalli said. Yelm, plus Ellensburg and Selah in Central Washington, had been part of Consolidated Communications’ Washington business, which Palisade purchased in May 2024 and also rebranded. Vadapalli introduced Lightcurve and its technology-upgrade and expansion plans in a South Sound Business story last September.
Lightcurve has been upgrading legacy copper lines in Ellensburg and Selah this year, replacing them with faster fiber-optic lines for residential and business customers, and will do the same next year in Yelm. Lightcurve’s focus this year was upgrades and new service for Centralia, Chehalis, Ellensburg, and Selah, which Vadapalli called a significant investment in improved communications technology.
Lightcurve offers 2 gig (gigabit per second) symmetric upload-download residential internet speeds, 2.5 gig business internet speeds, and 10-gig and higher dedicated internet or ethernet speeds for business on its fiber networks. It also does landline voice, which still has applications for businesses and others, and it provides services for businesses to help manage underlying IT infrastructure.
Lightcurve is nearing completion of extending fiber-optic lines into Centralia and Chehalis residential areas.
In mapping out improvement plans for the next couple years, Lightcurve sees opportunity for expansion in towns within a one- to two-hour drive of existing company service areas, Vadapalli said, declining to elaborate beyond plans for Yelm.
“We have a whole short list of communities that we’ve identified right now — and these are all areas where we would be going in and serving those communities for the first time,” he said.
A healthy share of Lightcurve’s customers are in the Tacoma metro area, but the company also has good customer presence in Ellensburg, Yelm, and Eatonville, south of Tacoma, he noted. Lightcurve’s South Sound service area stretches from Tacoma to Eatonville, Graham, Yelm, Centralia, Chehalis, and parts of Puyallup.
The investment in Lightcurve’s network will continue, Vadapalli said of the company’s business plan.
“The other thing that I am really pleased about is we (have) really dialed up the engagement that we have in all of the communities we serve,” he said, from financial help to employee volunteerism. “In most of these communities, you’ll be hard-pressed to go to an event and not find us in one of those events. … So in addition to obviously investing in network, we are significantly engaging with the communities.”
Assistance has included a financial contribution to the Ellensburg Downtown Association and delivering 1,000 boxes of crayons to support the Lewis County Back to School Supply Give-a-Way & Resource Fair to help students.
Lightcurve, which has an otter in its branding for “otterly” fast and reliable service, also partnered with Odd Otter Brewing Co. of Tacoma to launch a new Odd Otis strawberry kiwi hard seltzer last month.
“We are just trying to find ways in which we can work with local businesses to promote them,” Vadapalli said.