Getting connected: Frontier begins adding fiber optic cable to improve rural internet access
<p>Workers from Robinson Brothers of Rathdrum, Idaho, put tree limbs in a wood chipper on Tuesday. The tree limbs were cut when fiber optic cable was installed on telephone poles on Montana 37 north of Libby. (Caleb M. Soptelean/TWN)</p>
<p>Workers from Robinson Brothers of Rathdrum, Idaho, put tree limbs in a wood chipper on Tuesday. The tree limbs were cut when fiber optic cable was installed on telephone poles on Montana 37 north of Libby. (Caleb M. Soptelean/TWN)</p>
Broadband is coming to some rural Lincoln County residents, but it’s a slow process and may take a while longer.
That’s the word from Frontier Communications representatives in Washington, D.C.
Jennifer Schneider, vice president of legislative affairs, said the company will have added 200 customers under the Connect America Fund program by the end of this year.
The program, which began in 2015, allocates $1.11 million a year to Frontier to add fiber optic lines in Lincoln County for a total of $6.68 million through 2020.
Schneider explained that adding broadband to the rural high-cost areas is determined based on a Federal Communications Commission model covering households that do not have broadband service available through a fiber optic cable. These customers may still be able to get internet through a satellite.
The plan is to add broadband internet to 2,303 households by the end of 2020, Schneider said.
The company needs to have 40 percent of that, or 921 customers added, by the end of 2017 or it will be penalized, she said.
The Connect America Fund is a modernization of the Universal Service Fund, which was established years ago to ensure that each household in the U.S. had telephone service.
Schneider said the company plans to add 100 homes in the Troy area next year.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” she said, explaining that Frontier customers already have copper wiring in their homes, but that adding glass fiber optic lines in the area will make broadband internet available.
Under the Connect America Plan the company has to provide 10 Mbps of download speed and 1 Mbps of upload speed per second, which means that a home must be within 6,000 feet of a fiber optic line to be served, she said.
She noted that some homes that are not part of the Connect America Fund program will get internet as a supplemental benefit because of the project. She estimates this number at about 200 homes over the past two years.
“These are extremely costly areas to serve,” she said, adding that Frontier has an obligation to use the funds efficiently to get to the housing that it can serve. Funding is not just for adding the fiber optic line, but also for managing and operating the internet service, she said.
On Tuesday, representatives of Robinson Brothers were busy along Montana 37 north of Libby chipping wood from tree limbs that were cut down while fiber optic cable was placed on telephone lines.
An employee said that over the last month cable was added in a 2-mile stretch north of the Kootenai River.
Frontier spokesman Jeff Fulton said that fiber optic cable was also added in the Cedar Creek area in May.
Caleb M. Soptelean can be reached at 293-4124 or by email at csoptelean@thewesternnews.com.