Ottawa County officers are making progress on bridging the digital divide and understanding the associated fee to fill gaps the place high-speed web entry is unavailable.
Benefit Community Inc., an Ann Arbor-based marketing consultant employed to help on the county’s broadband initiative, has been analyzing outcomes from an web entry and affordability survey carried out within the latter half of 2021 that drew about 4,000 responses from residents.
The survey outcomes will mix with current speed-test knowledge on web entry to realize a “stable, verified understanding of broadband entry wanted throughout the county,” stated Paul Sachs, director of Ottawa County’s Planning and Efficiency Enchancment Division.
That understanding will present the idea for a plan to fill the gaps throughout Ottawa County the place residents and companies lack broadband web service, Sachs stated. He expects Benefit Community to current a closing evaluation on survey outcomes subsequent month.
“With that knowledge we are able to begin to paint an image of what the infrastructure panorama appears like within the county so we are able to consider from a pre-engineering perspective how we are able to fill in, if you’ll, the lacking gaps and infrastructure growth to ship that last-mile broadband service to those who want it,” Sachs stated.
As soon as Benefit Community completes the info evaluation, City Wi-fi Options LLC, a Canton consulting agency that assists communities on broadband tasks, will develop a feasibility evaluation, preliminary engineering design, and a value mannequin for bettering service and entry in Ottawa County, which has a inhabitants of practically 300,000 folks and is Michigan’s fastest-growing county.
Rethinking the enterprise mannequin
An space or neighborhood usually lacks broadband service as a result of the inhabitants density is just too low. Web service suppliers can’t join sufficient new clients to the service to justify the price of extending infrastructure to a rural space, stated Douglas Weber, president of City Wi-fi Options.
“It isn’t economically possible to put fiber to each house and enterprise throughout the county. If it was, you’ll have seen all the main ISPs doing so already,” Weber stated. “Wi-fi know-how has improved to the purpose the place it’s delivering web speeds similar to fiber and may be deployed in a extra economically prudent method.”
An answer to gaps in high-speed web entry in Ottawa County will probably contain a hybrid system utilizing fiber optics infrastructure and wi-fi know-how in addition to public-private partnerships, Sachs stated.
“We have to overcome the historic challenges by way of the normal strategies of infrastructure growth throughout the county,” stated Sachs, who sees broadband web service in the present day as an “important utility.”
“Everybody wants a dependable, reasonably priced connection. We have now to make that occur and it’s going to require some new pondering,” he stated. “That interprets into the necessity to reinterpret our pondering on these conventional strategies of infrastructure deployment, particular because it pertains to broadband. The enterprise mannequin should evolve. Not solely the enterprise mannequin, however the know-how mannequin.”
Deploying wi-fi communications towers in Ottawa County is a part of ongoing conversations with web service suppliers (ISPs). ISPs may then lease capability on the towers to supply service to households and companies, producing a income stream for the county, Sachs stated. The county has already erected towers in rural townships utilizing that mannequin, he added.
Digital divide, new funding
Ottawa County is certainly one of a number of communities in Michigan — together with Kent and Allegan counties — engaged on initiatives to bridge the so-called digital divide and prolong broadband to areas that presently lack service.
Related Nation Michigan, a corporation that advocates for higher broadband entry, estimates that 300,000 to 400,000 households throughout the state lack primary entry to high-speed web service. That determine grows to as excessive as 1.25 million households as soon as affordability and different points are thought-about, corresponding to the power of households to afford modems, laptop computer computer systems and digital units, Related Nation Michigan Government Director Eric Frederick stated.
The COVID-19 pandemic — which led to exponential development in telehealth, distant work, and distant studying — has introduced far higher consideration to the difficulty, Frederick stated.
“It’s positively introduced it to the forefront,” he stated. “COVID actually introduced it to mild that it’s an extremely vital matter for everybody in each sector.”
The rising want for broadband entry has led to extra public funding for broadband infrastructure. States, counties and municipalities can use federal COVID-19 aid funds to handle broadband infrastructure, Frederick stated.
On prime of the pandemic aid cash, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Funding and Jobs Act that President Biden signed in November 2021 supplies $65 billion for bettering web infrastructure throughout the nation. States will administer and distribute the funding by grants.
Frederick believes the general public funding now out there can lastly shut the digital divide “if these {dollars} are applied effectively and well.” He describes the current temper to handle the difficulty as “fairly aspirational.”
“With the (federal) infrastructure act, we lastly have an opportunity to make some progress, if not complete progress, on some features of the digital divide,” he stated.
Partnerships between communities and personal ISPs are “completely key” to creating progress, Frederick stated. Broadband funding within the Infrastructure Funding and Jobs Act requires 25 p.c in native matching funds, he famous.
“Are there ways in which communities and ISPs can associate collectively to make these {dollars} stretch even additional? We predict that’s going to be how these funds are applied well to essentially shut the divide and ensure we do have sufficient assets to lastly be capable to do this,” Frederick stated.
Over the previous couple of years, the state awarded $12.7 million in grants to communities to attach greater than 12,200 properties and companies to high-speed web service.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer final June created the Michigan Excessive-Velocity Web Workplace to coordinate efforts to make high-speed web service extra accessible and reasonably priced in Michigan, though the workplace has gone unfunded and lacks workers.
A invoice into account within the state Home would create the Workplace of Broadband and Digital Infrastructure inside the Michigan Division of Labor and Financial Alternative. Among the many duties for the workplace is to “facilitate collaboration amongst private and non-private entities to encourage partnerships, regional coordination, and streamlined insurance policies to extend fashionable broadband and digital infrastructure,” in line with a Home Fiscal Company evaluation of Home Invoice 5038.
The Division of Labor and Financial Alternative estimates that the workplace would wish $2.5 million to rent workers and function. The workplace may use federal funds to cowl administrative prices.