Summers County GigReady Broadband Internet Application
By Ted Kula
As part of the efforts to bring broadband to unserved and under-served areas of our community, Summers County applied for the WV GigReady Project. GigReady is an incentive program administered by the WV Department of Economic Development, the WV Broadband Enhancement Council, and the State Broadband Office. The application is part of a larger project in cooperation and partnership with Raleigh County. Specifically, the project will provide fiber broadband to the area connecting the two counties following a route from Ghent through Nimitz to the south end of the Hinton bypass. There, the fiber will connect with the partner Internet Service Provider (ISP) Gigabeam’s fiber line.
Region 1 Planning and Development Council acted as the application agent on behalf of the Summers County Commission. Partnering with Raleigh County on the project will increase the overall project score because the Development Office encourages community cooperation. The application has been successfully submitted and is now under review for potential award. Each county has also committed matching funds to this project, with Summers County’s commitment of up to $250,000 for the project. If approved, the match would be $750K, making the Summers County portion a $1M project.
We were strategic in our decisions on this project. First, we chose to partner with Raleigh County, because this will provide redundancy in the network, and our application will be scored higher, both of which should increase the chance of award. Second, we chose to partner with Gigabeam because they have already been awarded RDOF (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) monies to provide fiber to the southeastern portion of Summers County. RDOF is a separate project that will bring fiber to that portion of the county from the Rich Creek direction. This is where the redundancy comes in: the signal can come from two different directions. This is intelligent network design, because it will result in fewer outages, which will benefit the residents of Summers County. It’s like having two roads to the same house. It also provides vendor competition in areas where broadband may already exist but may be unaffordable due to a lack of ISP competition.
This is just one of about a dozen broadband projects, all in different stages, I am nurturing in Summers County. Bringing broadband to Summers County is like building roads – it takes time and money and is not a short-turn process. Though it takes a lot of planning and consideration at the front-end of the project, we will reap rewards upon project completion by having fast and reliable internet.
