When talking about Portage County, it is easy to forget that the 15th largest county in the State of Ohio has several townships that do not have broadband. That is about to change, as the Portage County Commissioners announced a rural broadband expansion project at a luncheon last Thursday afternoon at Freedom Town Hall.
“In 2021 we started looking into what we could do and identify some of the areas that had service but inferior service and who had no service,” said Portage County Commissioners president Anthony Badalamenti. “There were definitely places that stood out. We started looking for people to come and help us. Charter Communications was the best place, so it was absolutely incredible to start dealing with them. The opportunity is to not just have internet service but have one gigabyte of internet service.”
According to Badalamenti, there are approximately 162,000 Portage County residents who do not have internet service and the Portage County Commissioners have received grants at the state and federal level to help fund the project.
The project is being done by Spectrum, a broadband service of Charter Communications, and they have already broken ground on their first three marks and plan to have service installed in Freedom Township at the end of the first fiscal quarter, which would allow residents to be in direct contact with the police department.
Members of neighboring Township boards of trustees were in attendance for the official announcement as well as government officials, including State Representative Gail Pavliga from Ohio’s 72nd House District and Congressman Dave Joyce’s Community Relations Director Thomas Queen.
Pavliga outlined the importance of Portage County having broadband service to support economic development and the challenges of not having broadband service during the pandemic.
“Just a few years ago but when we had COVID-19, we had people who could not connect and their parents had to take them to local areas just to be able to do their schoolwork and to be connected,” she added. “If we are going to be a state wanting to attract business here, especially to the regents here in Portage County in Northeast Ohio, it is vitally important we be able to have connectivity.”
Brian Young, Spectrum’s Director of Government Affairs, said that right before the pandemic started, the Federal Communications Commissioners developed a project called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, designed to help parts of the Country that did not have internet access.
Having previously built cable systems in Ohio with its own private capital, Charter Communications is footing most of the bill for this project, contributing $4 billion.
Charter Communications Area Vice President of Field operations Chuck Sullivan spoke about the role that the Northern Ohio field operations team will serve.
“We design, build and maintain the broadband services to homes that quite honestly never thought they would have the opportunity to have those services,” he said. “Our responsibilities are to provide world class service.”
Jim Higham, Spectrum’s Director of Field Engineering, talked about the advances that Charter Communication has made not only in rural Portage County but also all over rural Ohio.
“We are expanding our services into many areas that we never though were even possible before and never thought about doing it before,” he added. “With this expansion, my team’s primary responsibility is for the network is to design, build and make sure our network is fully functional for all of our customers.”
He also said there was a website that people could visit, called www.spectrumruralbuild.com that listed all the addresses that were eligible to receive broadband service.
Young added that he had worked with Portage County’s Emergency Management Agency Director Ryan Shackelford to make sure specific addresses were included on the list but there was still time to add addresses that had recently changed.
Young concluded the luncheon by talking about how the state is in another round of grant funding to add more addresses to the list called the Ohio Residential Broadband Expansion Grant Program, it will provide broadband coverage to addresses that were previously not included in the program. He credited Hiram, Nelson and Freedom townships for providing Spectrum with more addresses that would be eligible to receive broadband service.
“Those are all homes that were not included in the previous one so there is this evolution as addresses become available to become funded,” he said. “We have been looking at that. We are hoping to find out from the state in the May or June time frame if it is awarded but it is again part of the process. We do appreciate all of the support from everyone at the county and local level doing that.”
At the end of the event, Charter Communications brought one of their trucks to demonstrate the fiber splicing and the process involved with installing internet service.
