An Infrastructure Upgrade Helps Upstate Niagara Cooperative Build Stronger Communities And A Brighter Future
Lumen Customer Stories Team
Posted On January 8, 2025
Upstate Niagara Cooperative has a legacy that extends far beyond the dairy products they produce. Their mission is to nourish life in every sense—from growing sustainable feed and protecting local waterways to caring for their animals with respect and supporting farmers’ livelihoods. Through this dedication and the 250+ dairy farms, Upstate delivers healthy, delicious high-quality dairy products to families throughout the country.
While it might seem that the pastoral life is relatively untouched by modern advancements, today’s dairy farming is deeply dependent on technology. From machines that milk cows to collars that monitor fertility, technology boosts efficiency at every turn. Supporting these advancements requires a seamless, 24/7 connection between farms, plants, call centers and corporate headquarters.
“Cows continue to give milk every day—even on Christmas—which means we always have to be ready to work,” says Ralph Caballero, Infrastructure Manager at Upstate Niagara Cooperative. “We need a communication network that can keep up with us all the time, which means having higher availability, multiple circuits and multiple solutions to sustain our operations.”
Despite these needs, Upstate Niagara Cooperative faced significant challenges with a network that no longer fit their business. The complexity of scheduling maintenance and downtime windows in their round-the-clock operations underscored the necessity for greater availability across all sites.
To address this, the 10-person IT team looked for a technology partner to boost the cooperative’s resiliency by upgrading from outdated POTS telephone lines to infrastructure better suited to contemporary farming practices.
Better Connectivity Across the Board
The cooperative explored various technology providers, but the future-focused solutions and “person-first” attitude Lumen offered made a significant impression on Ralph and his team.
“I spoke with other ISP vendors, but I didn’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling that I got with Lumen,” Caballero says. “Local matters here. Lumen has a local presence, so reps can stop by and talk face-to-face.”
The teams began to work on enhancing overall connectivity, including adding more reliable voice and data services and stronger data circuits. Lumen offered several options for these upgrades:
By leveraging SD-WAN technology, the cooperative can utilize multiple circuits within two appliances, ensuring that if one circuit fails, the other seamlessly takes over without any disruption. This high availability is essential for maintaining continuous operations in their call centers and other mission-critical functions, where even a brief downtime can have significant impacts on productivity and customer service.
“Our plants are 24/7, so we don’t have windows for maintenance or downtime,” Caballero says. “We invested in solutions with Lumen to ensure higher availability, which has helped us a lot.”
To address the issues with costly and unreliable traditional telephone lines, Upstate Niagara Cooperative adopted Lumen® Voice Complete®. This upgrade modernizes their telecommunications infrastructure, providing enhanced reliability for voice communications throughout their facilities.
A Network That Works as Hard as Farmers
Upstate Niagara Cooperative’s dairy farmers dedicate 14–16 hours a day to their work, and the cooperative can’t afford to have an unreliable network with under-performing services. After adopting Lumen solutions, the cooperative saw an immediate boost in reliability. “We are at a 98% uptime now, and the other 2% does not impact us because of the high availability that we have built in,” Caballero says.
In the event of a failover scenario, the IT team can seamlessly redirect voice traffic to other locations, maintaining smooth operations. The impact of those enhanced connections reaches far beyond the organization to the cooperative’s partners and, ultimately, their consumers.
“By increasing our stability, they have increased the stability of the whole community,” Caballero says.
The next phase of partnership involves upgrading Upstate Niagara Cooperative from PRI to an SIP environment for enhanced network resiliency, ensuring complete voice redundancy to support farmers, plant workers, call support agents and more.
A dairy farmer’s work is never done, and in enabling reliable communication across all locations, the cooperative empowers farmers to focus on what they do best: nourish families across the region. Thanks to Lumen, their network is now as resilient and hardworking as they are.
To read more about how Lumen customers enjoy better networks and stronger uptimes, explore our collection of customer success stories.
Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement
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