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Fiber Broadband a 'Game Changer' for Huntingon, W. Va., Economy

As technology evolves, Mayor Steve Williams said speed is everything — and the current Internet offerings in Huntington aren’t fast enough.

(TNS) -- Huntington, W. Va., Mayor Steve Williams believes the future is in fiber — specifically, in super-fast Internet connections that can move gigabytes of data around the world in a matter of seconds.

Williams said he is determined to bring a fiber broadband network to Huntington because it would be a “game changer” for the city and regional economy.

“High-speed broadband is the new millennium equivalent of water and sewer being built,” Williams said. “We believe if we have high-speed broadband that is brought to the property line, that will create opportunity that otherwise isn’t available.”

A feasibility study conducted in 2014 using a grant from the West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council found it would cost nearly $25 million in capital investment to build and update the network over a 10-year study period. The business model, prepared by Cincinnati-based CostQuest Associates, projects the city would earn around $6.97 million in annual revenue off the network’s Internet and digital video subscribers. The model assumes residential gigabit Internet service would cost $70, and business gigabit Internet service would cost $100; bundled Internet and digital video service would cost $125 for residential customers and $160 for business customers.

The consultants found the network would turn a negligible profit, though; with annual operational costs and capital investments estimated at $6.90 million.

Bryan Chambers, communications director for Huntington, said the city is looking for grant funding that could be put toward building and sustaining the fiber network. He said the network would be “a break-even proposition” in its current form, but that the report is a “working document” that’s being altered and tweaked to fit the city’s needs.

“(A fiber network) has been one of the mayor’s goals from day one and this gives us a roadmap,” Chambers said. “Certainly there’s more work to be done on it, but it gives us a great starting point and allows us to have these open discussions with entities that could possibly partner with us.”

Williams believes the potential jobs and corporate investment the fiber network could bring to Huntington would make the network more than pay for itself in the long-term.

“Nothing is better or faster than fiber”

Most home Internet services — including dial-up, DSL and cable broadband — are carried over copper wires. Though advancements in technology have allowed Internet service providers to offer speeds thousands of times faster than dial-up, Citynet president and CEO Jim Martin says there will always be an inherent limit to how much bandwidth copper networks can handle.

That’s why his company is using 100-percent fiber optic connections from the Internet backbone to select customers in Bridgeport who are participating in a pilot project dubbed “GigaPort.” Copper-based networks use equipment that transmit, receive and amplify signals over the wire. Fiber-based networks use lasers that send information as light through hair-like strands of glass tubes.

“Once you deliver fiber to a household or business, these have unlimited capabilities to provide bandwidth. Nothing is better or faster than fiber and I don’t think we’ll ever see anything maybe in the rest of the existence of the earth because nothing is faster than the speed of light that we know of ...

“I think fiber is the final medium for content delivery and the more fiber we put out there, the better it will be for everyone,” Martin said.

When GigaPort launched in January, it became West Virginia’s first Internet service provider to offer gigabit Internet speeds to residential customers. An unmetered gigabit connection to the Internet costs $75 — just $5 more than Google Fiber, which is only available in a handful of U.S. metropolitan areas.

Martin said 30 of the 100 homes that are in GigaPort’s small pilot project area have signed on for the service, and he expects that number to grow by the time the pilot project ends in June.

“Those who purchased the service, they say they love it,” Martin said. “It is so much faster and more reliable than what they had before.”

Using a gigabit Internet connection, a two-hour high-definition movie could be downloaded in less than a minute. While the sheer speed of gigabit Internet is impressive, some major Internet service providers have argued the service is not needed by the average person.

Martin believes gigabit Internet may be a novelty right now, but it will be necessary soon as bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming television, 4K TV and technologies that have yet to be conceived are adopted by more consumers.

“You’ve got more and more devices coming online — they call it the ‘Internet of Things’ — and you’re just going to have this inherent overhead on this network with all these things talking and communicating across the Web. So 50 (megabits) might be reasonable right now, but when you throw 4K TV into it, you’re going to need about 100 (megabits), and who knows what new services are going to be deployed in the future.”

“We intend to do this”

Williams said the business model for Huntington’s fiber network will focus on attracting businesses to the city. As technology evolves, Williams said speed is everything — and the current Internet offerings in Huntington aren’t fast enough.

“Do you want to go into a NASCAR race with a Volkswagen Beetle?” Williams said. “The Volkswagen Beetle certainly has a function and it can get people where they want to go, but if you’re going to be competing in the international marketplace, broadband is the interstate of the 21st century. In order for us to compete effectively, we don’t need as much to have an international airport as we need the ability to compete with somebody across the world in China and be able to compete at a speed that belies any other place.”

Williams said the two most feasible communities for the fiber network to be installed would be the downtown and West End areas. The downtown area includes Marshall University, Cabell Huntington Hospital, the Northcott Court public housing project the city plans to tear down and develop, and a 78-acre brownfield to the east of Marshall’s campus for which the city recently received $200,000 in federal funding to reclaim and develop.

The West End includes everything from First Street West to Camden Park, including an area around 14th Street West Williams said could be developed for industrial or retail purposes.

Williams said the network would give businesses the same quality of service and data capacity they could get in a big city, with the small-town charms you can’t find in a city.

“We see broadband as being a game-changer for economic development for companies to be able to compete effectively in the international marketplace,” Williams said. “They can do that right here from Huntington, West Virginia, without all the trappings of large metro life.

“We have the ability to show people the quality of life that we have here and that they can operate as aggressively and fast as anyone, but they can also step away and be able to enjoy all the qualities of life that small towns offer that big cities can’t,” Williams said.

Williams said such a high-speed fiber-optic network could also draw entrepreneurs and startups to Huntington and help draw more millennials to the city. He said the network would help Huntington businesses compete at the same level with businesses in any major city in the world.

“We have people that compete on the international marketplace every single day,” Williams said. “We don’t ever have reason to think we should sit second to everyone. We need to make sure that more of those among us have the opportunity to compete.”

Williams said the city is looking into the feasibility of forming a public-private partnership to develop the fiber network. Williams said it would be cost-prohibitive for the city to build and manage the network itself, but a public-private partnership would allow the city to retain ownership over the fiber while letting an outside company sell the service itself.

No matter how the city decides to approach building the network, Williams said it will happen.

“This is something we need to have to compete at the level we expect to compete at in the city,” Williams said. “This is necessary for us to have Huntington transformed and frankly, to show that this can transform the region for the next 25 years. We intend to do this. What we have to determine is how do we use this study to define how we can get there. That’s what we’re in the midst of assessing right now.”

©2015 the Charleston Daily Mail (Charleston, W.Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.