Chemung County will soon research where in the county broadband internet access is lacking.
The county legislature voted at it’s meeting on May 8th for the implementation of a web-based survey tool in conjunction with ECC Technologies, a Rochester-based company focused on expanding broadband services.
Information gathered from the six-month CrowdFiber survey, costing $10,000, would provide information on parts of the county under-served — or not served at all — by broadband infrastructure.
Officials say information gathered by CrowdFiber — including availability, adoption rates, costs, performance and satisfaction — would entice providers to build out to more rural areas and demonstrate need and demand for use in future grant applications.
Chemung County has limited control over providers expanding their networks, and there are many obstacles to expanding broadband, including investment cost, residential density and adoption rates, said Stephen Wilber, the county’s information technology director.
New York state officials have pushed to provide broadband internet to all residents by 2018, but Wilber said rural areas of Chemung County are lacking.
“We’re just trying to facilitate it so that we can try to come up with a resolution. I get calls all the time. I get calls and emails, people stop me and say, what can you do? They want to know why the county isn’t running stuff to their houses,” Wilber told legislators Thursday. “We’re just trying to get a plan together so that then, as a group, we can possibly get some grant funding or get one of these providers to get grant funding to move in.”
Wilber said he previously reached out to a provider to see if they could build infrastructure out to the Catlin Town Hall. “They wanted $90,000 just to run the cable out there,” he said. CrowdFiber, he added, “will give us the information to say, you’ve got 50 houses here, can we get someone in to help?”
Legislator Rodney Strange, R-District 15, said he’s gotten several calls from constituents and businesses in his district who lack broadband internet access.
“I have a concrete company out there that uses the internet a lot, and they only have dial-up service. They have been asking for it,” he said. “They keep seeing all these millions of dollars coming from the state and the federal government to expand internet to all the rural areas, and they call me every time they hear this. We’ve got to do something. I keep telling them we’re looking at it, and nothing ever happens.”
Budget committee members unanimously recommended the resolution for approval at the legislature’s May 8 meeting, but not without some concerns.
Legislator Tom Sweet, R-District 3, wondered whether it was the county’s responsibility to initiate the survey and asked whether it could be performed at a lower cost. Money for the CrowdFiber tool was not included in the 2017 budget, he noted.
But others, including Legislator Kenneth Miller, R-District 5, fully supported the expenditure.
“We’ve been on a steady decline since the flood of ’72 in population,” Miller said. “To want to bring business here, keep young people here, develop our area that we have, you’ve got to have the infrastructure.”