The panel on Wednesday unanimously authorized using American Rescue Plan Act money for a three-year contract to make fiber-optic broadband available to nearly 25,000 homes, including almost 3,100 in Cheshire County.
Also covered will be places in Hillsborough, Sullivan, Grafton, Merrimack, Coos and Carroll counties.
Consolidated has also pledged to add another 32,000 homes in the project area using its own money, but it didn't have a county-by-county breakdown Thursday for these additional locations.
Extensive engineering work must be done before workers in bucket trucks start stringing fiber-optic cable on poles, Mary Ellen Player, the company's vice president of markets and expansion, said in an interview.
"We hope to start construction at the end of this year," she said. "Our goal is to complete as much as possible in 2024."
The project will extend service to rural areas. Consolidated wouldn't get an adequate return on investing in the expansion without the government funding now being made available, Player said.
Consumers can expect to pay $70 per month, increasing to $95 after one year, if they buy the company's most popular level of service, according to its website. The cheapest introductory rate is $35, increasing to $55 after a year.
Broadband is available in much of the state, including portions of rural towns, but has yet to be extended to some remote areas.
For example, most of the residents of Hancock, population 1,600, have access to broadband, but there is a "doughnut-hole" area of the community that is harder to reach and doesn't have it, said Jim Callahan, a member of the Hancock Telecommunications Committee and board chairman of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough.
Under the new project, 280 locations in town will gain access to this service, giving Hancock full coverage, he said.
Callahan said his group has spent hundreds of hours strategizing how to bring broadband to unserved areas, including various funding options.
"It's been a long haul," he said. "It started out with people saying, 'We want broadband so we can watch Netflix,' but it's obviously a lot more important than that.
"It's telecommuting to work, it's telehealth, which is an increasingly large dimension of the services we provide at the hospital, and it's education. When COVID hit, there were stories of parents taking their kids down to a place where they can access Wi-Fi. That's no way to live."
The portion of the project covered by federal funds includes 2,367 locations in Winchester, 368 in Alstead, 338 in Richmond, four in Marlow and one in Walpole. In Hillsborough and Sullivan counties, it includes 280 locations in Hancock, 169 in Langdon and 26 in Acworth.
Federal funds were also used last year when the Executive Council awarded $50 million to the N.H. Electric Cooperative for a program involving 23,000 households across the state, but not including Cheshire County.
A mapping project is underway to determine how much of the state will still lack this service even after the expansion.
© 2023 The Keene Sentinel (Keene, N.H.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
