The Board of Supervisors last week gave a unanimous OK to a three-way partnership among the county, the co-op and the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) to get moving on installing the lines after a successful pilot project was completed in early May.
In the pilot program, 49 homes, businesses and county facilities were connected to the co-op's new broadband service in an area extending from West Quaker Road to Prince George Drive (Route 156). The Prince George Emergency Crew headquarters on Prince George Drive was the last location to tie into the network.
Under the partnership, the county will allocate $1 million in IDA bond funds to the cooperative to help cover the cost of connecting all of its substations and any homes or businesses within 1,000 feet of a Virginia Department of Transportation-maintained road along the fiber-optic cable route.
The lines would be extended north and south along Prince George Drive to run from the vicinity of J.E.J. Moore Middle School to just south of the Hopewell city line. A connecting line would run along Pole Run Road from Prince George Drive to James River Drive at Burrowsville, and another line would run from Pole Run Road north to James River Drive about 2 miles west of Garysville.
In a presentation at the emergency crew headquarters on May 2, Casey Logan, the co-op's vice president of engineering and project manager for the broadband initiative, said just connecting the substations would require the installation of about 250 miles of fiber-optic cable.
The service the co-op is now providing offers a speed of 30 megabytes per second with no data cap and unlimited usage. Logan said that using fiber-optic cable instead of coaxial cable means data speeds could increase over time. The cost is $82 a month.
The agreement gives the cooperative four years to get 500 locations hooked up. If fewer than 500 are connected by the end of the four years, the co-op will pay back $2,000 of the IDA funds for each location under 500.
Any government facilities that connect to the network will pay the residential rate. Prince George Electric has not yet set a commercial rate for the service.
Officials of the cooperative have said their motivation for undertaking the broadband initiative was to help fill a void that many rural areas face. The economics of providing broadband internet service in rural areas just don't add up for the cable TV and telephone companies, Logan explained. But the co-op, as a nonprofit member-owned entity, was able to make the numbers work.
"I honestly believe that without this, rural America will die," said M.E. "Mike" Malandro, the co-op's president and CEO.
The agreement still requires ratification from the IDA, which is scheduled to meet on July 19. If the partnership is approved, co-op officials say construction will start within 60 days.
©2017 The Progress-Index, Petersburg, Va. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
