Iron County eyes broadband funding

By ZACHARY MARANO

zmarano@yourdailyglobe.com

Hurley — The Iron County Board of Supervisors held a hearing on Tuesday to prepare for applying for funds through the bipartisan deal for broadband infrastructure that was passed in Congress in early November.

At the board of supervisors’ meeting in December, Iron County Development Zone Coordinator Kelly Klein said that the bipartisan deal will deliver $65 billion to help with broadband infrastructure development. Klein said that each state will receive $100 million with the opportunity to compete for additional funding.

“The purpose of today’s meeting is to kick off what we should be doing as a county to prepare ourselves to go after some of that money,” Klein said on Tuesday. “The infrastructure money probably won’t be coming in until late this year or early next year. We have some time to plan and take some steps so we’re ready to go.”

Klein said the Iron County broadband committee has been working since 2013 to expand broadband in the county. He said that there are currently 20 fixed wireless towers servicing Iron County and the next phase of infrastructure development should be deploying fiber optic cables in the ground, which he called the “gold standard” for broadband services.

To provide information to the board, Klein invited the Northwest Regional Planning Commission and Norvado, a local internet service provider, to the meeting. Crystal Rohde, a business development and IT specialist, shared the results of the commision’s recent northwest Wisconsin broadband survey study.

“This project really came to be after some conversations I had with Kelly Klein,” Rohde said. “He brought to the conversation that Iron County had a need for some updated data to support their continued broadband expansion efforts. A survey was done several years ago and there was a need for updated data.”

Rohde said that some information on broadband internet in the county is reported to the Federal Communications Commission, but the aggregated census block data is very generalized and not particularly useful when planning on a local level. She said that the survey will give them hard data about their broadband needs that will help them secure funding for infrastructure.

Rohde said that the NRPC developed surveys with the purpose of determining the characteristics of broadband internet in the region. The surveys encompassed Ashland, Bayfield, Douglas and Iron counties, and each county approved their own residential and business surveys, so eight surveys were developed. She said they mailed almost 50,000 surveys to residents and businesses in the four counties.

According to the final survey counts, Iron County illustrated a high degree of dissatisfaction with internet service, with 69% of residents saying they were not satisfied with their service. Most Iron County residents are using Century Link as their internet service provider and digital subscriber lines as their internet service type. When asked why they were not satisfied, the three most common reasons were speed, price and service reliability.

Rohde said they only received replies from 39 businesses in Iron County, but 23 of them stated that they were not satisfied with internet service. She said that the most common reasons cited by businesses were also speed and price. In the survey, five of the 39 businesses indicated they are considering moving their business out of the county due to issues related to connectivity with broadband.

The commission did not allow for comments in the residential broadband survey but for the business broadband survey, comments said that the Northwoods is overdue for an upgrade in internet services and there needs to be more competition between ISP’s.

Klein said that he invited Norvado to the meeting because the Cable, Wisconsin-based internet service provider has previously worked with Bayfield and Price counties, so they are familiar with providing broadband access to rural areas like Iron County.

Chad Young, the CEO and general manager of Norvado, came to provide additional information to the board. Young said that he is very passionate about broadband access because he thinks it is one of their best vehicles for economic growth.

“Coaxial cable and satellite have limitations and that’s why we believe fiber is future proof,” Young said. “In other words, we’re doing 1 GB to date for our customers, we will have 2 GB by next year as a top speed and they’re trialing 10 GB out now.”

Young said that it is expensive to develop broadband infrastructure in rural areas, but the government provides funding to encourage them to do this. He said it would cost about $18.8 million to deploy fiber optic cable in an area on the scale of Iron County, but that grant programs would greatly reduce that cost.

When Klein asked what the board of supervisors’ next step should be, Young said they should use the Northwest Regional Planning Commission’s survey to identify where they have gaps in service and the ISPs the county can work with in those areas.

“We’re not going to have anything to put together if we don’t come up with a plan. That’s what we need to do — put something together and come back in the near future,” Board Chair Joseph Pinardi said.