warren county

Content tagged with "warren county"

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Warren Co. Pennsylvania Seeks Partner to Bring Broadband to Rural Residents

In late August, Warren County Commissioners in northwest Pennsylvania issued a RFP that sought to establish a public-private partnership to bring high-speed Internet connectivity to rural parts of the county near the Allegheny National Forest and River.

County officials are now reviewing proposals for a plan to “design, engineer, procure, install, operate, manage, and maintain high speed Internet to connect and serve the underserved rural areas of the county.” The initiative is part of the county Broadband Task Force’s effort to close the digital divide in a region that is nearly 900 square miles and home to 40,000 residents.

The RFP calls for three required outcomes

  • High-speed Internet access for the fire departments in Garland, Wrightsville, Sugar Grove, Spring Creek, and Spartansburg.
  • Wireless or wireline connectivity to businesses and residential households in Garland, Wrightsville, Sugar Grove, Spring Creek, and Spartansburg communities.
  • Offer “no cost service” to municipal entities in the county.

And while the RFP does not specifically require wireless network proposals, the RFP puts its thumb on the scale in favor of proposals that detail a “Primary Wireless Solution.”

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The county would own the infrastructure for three years and, during that time, the Internet service provider who wins the bid will pay a rights-of-way agreement for the network, and will be responsible for the management and maintenance of the network. The county is also willing to provide access to its vertical assets to enable the deployment of wireless technology. 

The RFP does not specify required subscription costs or low cost options for subscribers but does ask applicants to provide a five-year customer rate table and specifies that they are looking for a project that is beneficial to all parties, including the residents.

Franklin, Kentucky Expands Fiber Pilot Partnership with Recent RDOF Wins

Franklin, Kentucky’s (pop. 8,400) electric utility is gearing up for an expansion of its partnership with Warren Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation (WRECC) with the help of $2.3 million from the recent FCC Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The new partnership will allow Franklin EPB to add new service to roughly 250 locations adjacent to a current project in the area.

The expansion project will add subscribers in the northeast region of Simpson County and nearby parts of the city of Franklin in the south-central part of the state, where the two entities are operating a two-area fiber pilot.

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It represents the growth of a collaboration between Franklin EPB and the electric cooperative. In 2019, the two partnered up to deploy service with Franklin EPB leasing dark fiber from the cooperative and acting as service provider to “350 of its customers in northeast Simpson County and in an area on the southeast side of Franklin.” The project brought symmetrical 100 Megabit per second (Mbps) and 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) options for $60 and $80/month to those locations and has brought service to a lot of happy members

Springboro, Ohio Hopes to Spur Competition and Economic Growth with Conduit Loop

After years of fielding complaints from residents about the speed, reliability, and poor customer service of the city’s single wireline broadband provider, Springboro, Ohio (pop. 19,000) has decided enough is enough. Over the next year, the city (situated ten miles south of Dayton) will build a 23-mile fiber loop for municipal services and, at the same time, lay five additional conduits to entice additional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to come in and offer service, stimulating competition and economic development in the region moving forward.

A Fiber Master Plan

City Manager Chris Pozzuto laid out the plan for the city council, which staff had been working on for the last half year, back in July. It was driven in part by the criticism his office had fielded for years about the incumbent wireline service provider (the two satellite providers also prompted plenty of complaints of their own). Out of a desire both to provide residents with symmetrical gigabit access and stimulate economic development on a 200-acre commercial plot, Pozzuto started talking with regional partners and putting together an alterative.

The city’s Fiber Master Plan [pdf] calls for a 72-strand, 23-mile loop to be built around Springboro, along every major street and thoroughfare and up to the entrance of every neighborhood. Via microtrenching, six conduits will be laid — one for the city, and the remaining for up to five new ISPs to compete for service. 

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CenturyLink Fails Ohio Community, 911 Goes Out During Storm

The people of Warren County, Ohio, endured some rough weather in June as a 70 mph derecho whipped through this southwest county. A series of errors from CenturyLink kept 911 service inoperable for more than 15 hours. According to Stop the Cap!:

During the outage, callers initially heard nothing after dialing 911. Sometime later, someone at CenturyLink reprogrammed the equipment to forward calls from the Warren County 911 system in southwest Ohio to distant Geauga County’s 911 center in northeast Ohio near Cleveland, surprising operators.

Geauga County is located in the extreme northeast corner of Ohio, about as far away from Warren County as one can get without leaving the state. CenturyLink attributes the incident to a combination of inexperienced technicians, human error, and understaffing.

While accidents happen, the crux of this problem is in how CenturyLink responded to it.

Warren community leaders requested that CenturyLink meet with them to explain the fiasco, but CenturyLink was a no-show. Commissioner Dave Young, understandably upset, wants the county to turn over 911 services to another service provider.

“I want to switch sooner rather than later,” Young said. “The way this went down and the response we got from CenturyLink and now three weeks later we still don’t know the reason? We call our liaison and her solution to the 911 system being down is keep calling the 800 number. There’s something wrong there."

These massive carriers want to pretend they are the only ones capable of providing telecommunications services, but the reality is that many others do it better, including local governments and smaller, local private companies. The large carriers are a victim of their scale - no one knows what is going on.

In Iowa, Indianola Networks Helps Local Businesses

The latest addition to our Community Broadband Network Map is Indianola, Iowa. The Indianola Municipal Utilities own a network that a private partner, MCG, presently uses to offer services to commercial companies. Come summer, the network will begin serving residents also. Indianola is the county seat of Warren County and has a population pushing 15,000. Back in 1998, the city had a referendum before building a fiber ring. The utility first used its telecommunications capacity for SCADA applications and public safety communications but began using spare capacity to benefit local businesses after 2005. Indianola describes its network as open access but the network only has one provider. Nonetheless, it serves 70 commercial customers and is presently expanding. It is not available on citywide basis yet and further rollout will be on an incremental basis over many years. In the open access arragement, service providers have to come to an agreement with the utility on pricing and adequate levels of customer support. The utility entered the broadband space because incumbent providers Qwest (now CenturyLink) and Mediacom were not meeting local business needs, a familiar story we hear from communities around the country. Contrary to the common claims of big cable and DSL companies, the city was still willing to work with its telecom competitors -- but it was Mediacom that said it was uninterested in using utility ducts created when parts of town were transitioned from aerial utility service to buried. In reaction to the competition, Mediacom dropped its business pricing for customers that agreed to long-term contract offerings. IMU (and partner MCG) once had a considerable advantage in pricing but Mediacom's new packages have eroded some of that difference. Fortunately, IMU has a better reputation for service and does not require long term contracts. Indianola, Iowa One of the biggest benefits to the community is the high-capacity connections at schools, libraries, and public buildings. Schools connect to each other at a gigabit, allowing them to centralize network operations and cut costs. The municipal and county governments gain the same benefits.