County 4G tests go well

Limited service by year’s end

By Zoey McGee | Manor Ink

Sullivan County, NY – Three years ago, Sullivan County embarked on an innovative project to bring access to broadband services to unserved areas of the county. Recently, Manor Ink interviewed Mike Brooks, chairman of Sullivan County Broadband LDC, on the current status of the county’s initiative and the goals the group is hoping to achieve.

Brooks explained that the LDC, or Local Development Corporation, is a non-profit organization created by the County Legislature to undertake the construction of a high-speed wireless broadband system to make service available to residents countywide in places where commercial services like Spectrum and Verizon do not provide access.

“There is a lot of passion for this project,” Brooks said. “Having access to high-speed Internet is just such an important part of life. Whether it’s working from home, doing education from home, health care from home – it all is a modern necessity.”

Brooks himself has experienced difficulty accessing broadband service. “Spectrum stopped putting lines on the road about a mile or two before myhouse,” he said. “This situation exists in many parts of the county where Spectrum or Verizon do not go.”

Waiting on a federal grant

Brooks noted that the county created the LDC almost three years ago, but as with many things, the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed things down. He explained that the county and LDC are co-applicants for a $2 million federal economic development grant to support the broadband project, which was applied for over two years ago. But Brooks explained that the Legislature decided “not to wait forever” for the federal money in order to initiate the project. Instead, the legislators authorized $2 million of county funding to get started. However, more recently, the county and the LDC heard back from the federal agency handling the grant application, so it is possible that they will get some clarity in the next few weeks about the grant application and the prospect of receiving funding.

Multiple county-owned towers

The county owns nine towers where it can place equipment needed for broadband service. The plan is to put twelve towers online. In order to reach all of the areas of the county, the LDC may partner with other entities, such as libraries, to put antennas on the buildings to extend the reach of service.

The service will start off using 4G technology and will offer a 100MG service, which is quite robust. This will require that a small antenna be placed on those homes whose occupants wish to receive the service. There project is expected to provide quality Internet service because its signal has been successfully tested using equipment installed on the tower at the new County Jail site.

Brooks said that the service was recently demonstrated to some of the county legislators. Lorne Green, the county’s chief information officer, set up an antenna in the window of his office, facing the tower near the jail. “He piped the signal into our meeting room – which is a couple hundred feet away – and put it up on a big screen TV, and we were watching a movie, we had a news program on, and we were sending emails. It was flawless.”

100 percent coverage is the goal

Brooks explained that having nine county-owned towers gives the LDC the advantage of being able to jump-start the service before working to extend it out to areas that cannot access the signal from those towers.

“There is a lot of stuff going on in the background that we are trying to work our way through,” he said, citing both technical issues and contracts. The first tower the LDC is going to use to provide service is over by the jail, because they have equipment already in place there. They hope to have that first tower working some time this summer and have service from three or four more towers working by the end of the year.

Brooks closed by saying, “Our goal is to provide close to 100 percent coverage, to give that high-speed access to all the residents of the county.”