‘Last Mile’ Broadband Planning Launches in Humboldt
Participating through an online video feed, Connie Stewart, executive director of initiatives at Cal Poly Humboldt had a “ghostly” appearance which ironically was due to her Internet being “a little unstable today.” [Zoom image]
So-called “last mile” broadband Internet connections to outlying communities in Humboldt County have yet to be made but new funding will help those communities develop “near-shovel ready plans” to draw connection grants. At its Jan. 13 meeting, Humboldt County’s Board of Supervisors got an update on the county’s broadband service development and remaining needs.
Connie Stewart, executive director of initiatives at Cal Poly Humboldt, has been working on broadband development for years and said a plan to do “middle mile” regional connections in eastern Humboldt County and parts of Mendocino County has been realized.
“I’m pleased to report that all of the middle-miles that we had envisioned in that plan so long ago are now either built or funded and on the way to being built,” she said. “That’s taken a long time.”
The next step is “last mile” direct connections to outlying communities and their residents, which Stewart described as “the really fun part of trying to figure out how to get this actually to your home at a reasonable price.”
She said Hoopa has gotten an “astounding” $40 million grant for last mile connections along Route 299 and in Willow Creek.
But many communities – including those in Southern Humboldt – don’t have last mile connections or projects slated.
But there’s an effort afoot to change that.
Brian Court, a senior operations director from a company called Brightscape networks, said a collaboration between Brightscape and Cal Poly Humboldt has yielded a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to “tee up each of these communities for success in future funding rounds.”
The grant will be used to help broadband-deprived communities do the “upfront planning” that will make them competitive for connection project funding.
Most of the eligible communities are in Southern Humboldt, including Benbow, Alderpoint, Miranda, Weott, Shelter Cove, Myers Flat, Petrolia and Phillipsville.
“What we believe we can offer these communities, is we can work in conjunction with the experts on the ground, the community leaders, the people who know these communities backwards and forwards to provide near-shovel-ready plans so that as funding opportunities do become available, all the legwork has been done and we’ll have information ready to plug into those applications and unlock that funding,” said Court.
Chris Crandall, a higher education specialist working on community outreach, noted the importance of broadband service and its absence in some areas, saying, “We’re living in an AI age and many of our residents don’t even have Internet.”
Supervisors welcomed the update, with Supervisor Rex Bohn crediting Stewart’s work on broadband service in areas of his district.
“I don’t think we can underestimate what Connie’s done — Connie’s tentacles go everywhere for the benefit of Humboldt County,” he said.
Board Chair Mike Wilson highlighted the importance of last mile projects.
“We first got fiber here 20, 25 years ago and it went through communities that didn’t get the service,” he said. “They didn’t get connected, which was really annoying to a lot of folks and I’m glad to hear that folks in Garberville and Redway are now receiving service they should have gotten two decades ago.”
He added, “it’s only because of the efforts of the folks that have been working since 2005.”
The timeframe of the last mile planning is two years, and includes surveys, mapping, development of “actionable strategies” in each community and assistance with last mile grant applications.
The update was agendized by Supervisor Steve Madrone, who said it’s “rewarding to see this effort happening and that list of communities is certainly a very good list of deserving communities.”
He also gave a “thank you to the tribes for being a big part of this because without them I don’t think we’d have a lot of the infrastructure coming into play,” particularly in the northern and eastern parts of the county.
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Who is the provider for this connection? Its making a connection to rural homes, but what about the middle homes that have service form ATT, frontier, and astound, that is really bad? Do they get the real high speed fiber that works? And then there is starlink making all this obsolete.
So… the folks already paying for high-speed satellite internet are now going to pay for obsolete landline for everybody else. Someday the tooth fairy is going to run out of grant funding.
A whole bunch of Humboldt County folks have run outta teeth to put under their pillows. In Minnesota – the tooth fairy flew away.
IMHO:
YUP.
A million dollars of ‘Department of Agriculture Grant Money‘… to do “upfront planning”… and also plan for “tee up each of these communities for success in future funding rounds.”
So what is the Department of Agriculture doing funding fiber grants ?
Are the homeowners Growing corn ? Growing Hogs ? Growing Soybeans ?
Probably Growing Fiber ????
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Meanwhile: ” Starlink Service starting at $50/mo. No upfront hardware cost. Available in select areas. Enter your service address below to get started.
30 DAY TRIAL If not satisfied, return Starlink for a full refund
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Spend a million dollars… fund at $200 a home… you could install 5,000 homes !
All done. Public funding Kaput ! Nada ! Nyet !
Let me guess where all that grant money will go… !!!
“Let me guess where all that grant money will go… !!!”
They should just be more realistic and call it like it is; Graft Money
I like how the city dwelling bozos (as above), having internet think everyone else but them should have starlink, with its lousy latency, low packets, high price and low data because cheaper.
Services get increasingly more expensive per capita as the population density decreases.
I’m not sure what you are doing with your internet, but starlink works great with 100% of my applications. I could see some issues with some online gaming, otherwise what is your specific problem with it? Bitcoin mining? OF streaming?
give up on gaming. Its for children.
Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.
Nobody cares. Do you realize that many games and their platforms are or were originally written by the Gen X crowd? But you go right ahead and keep calling us children for what we choose to do with our time.
Hmm…
Why don’t you explain to me… why I should pay to fun fiber up 15 miles of dirt road… to provide blazing fast internet speed for your remote dwelling ?
I’m waiting…
I’m pretty sure no one is funding fiber for every dwelling at this point. They are talking entire towns like Garberville and Redway.
BUT the reason the government funds big projects like this –possibly even to remote homesteads eventually–is because they hope to get a return in paid taxes. Businesses and economic activity expand with infrastructure.
I am pretty sure that everybody in Garberville and Redway already have access to “infrastructure”. 101 Netlink gives excellent service.
Or if you are a high-roller and need speed… Starlink.
It sounds to me more like grant money is being provided to run small internet providers out of business.
I’m a big fan of 101 Netlink. They are my provider and are consistent and have strong support.
But Starlink is not a replacement for land based broadband for most folks. It requires high upfront equipment costs, relatively high ongoing monthly fees, clear sky views, and is vulnerable to congestion as subscriptions grow. That’s why federal and state broadband programs are trying to get fiber to more folks. I’m not informed enough to know whether the government is right on this but handing more money to the richest man on earth whose values don’t align with mine if there are other alternatives makes me a little sick to my stomach.
(Source: FCC Broadband Deployment Reports; NTIA BEAD program guidance.)
Anyway, in my understanding, this funding is not for building service immediately, nor is it designed to eliminate smaller internet Service Providers like 101 Netlink. The USDA grant discussed is for planning, mapping, and engineering so communities can compete for future last-mile funding. These programs often partner with or contract local ISPs to build and operate networks because they already know the terrain and customer base. Though since 101 is not strictly a land based business, I’m not sure if they would qualify.
In my opinion, broadband should be treated like roads, water, and electricity because education, telehealth especially in rural areas, news (like mine), and other small businesses now depend on it.
Yes and no on the equipment costs. You can get it for free at times, but the monthly fee will be somewhat higher. You can also get refurbished terminals or SL compliant ones for fairly cheap too ($200 or less), you’ll just have to create an account and shop around. I’ve seen them on Amazon. There are quite a few SL equipment resellers.
What helps the push for rural broadband? Health care. If that funding can be rolled into or combined with the “last mile” efforts, it will be a BIG help. It’s not like senators are averse to adding things to various bills. Telehealth is a big thing, but often there’s not enough bandwidth to support video connections. Telehealth helps when someone needs to have a doctor visit or consult, just so they can keep an Rx going that doesn’t require them to be physically in person.
Fiber upfront costs are pretty immense because it’s all brand-new lines, whereas coaxial cables that have been around since the 70s can be reused to some extent. $27k per mile is an average, and there’s a lot of miles to be laid out in the hills, so that’s really not going to work well. Relining all of Garberville might be cheaper than running a single fiber all the way to Petrolia’s store or the VFDs. Also, a good old twisted pair phone cable isn’t going to handle the immense amount of data that fiber can run.
To add, AT&T fiber runs through Willits, Garberville, Fortuna since what, 2012? It’s been quite a while to not connect people to it or at least letting 101 Netlink have access to some of the lines.
Trying to think of businesses and economic activity that will expand in the booming towns of Garberville and Redway. Maybe you can give examples of the economic activity to help us understand? How many years is “eventually”?
I don’t think many people think (or even want) Garberville or Redway to suddenly “boom.” The goal is preventing further decline, keeping services functioning, and giving existing residents and businesses the ability to possibly increase economic activity. Let’s just look at my site. The more people that come to my site, the more money I make. The more money I make, the more freelancers I hire and also my personal economics would improve and I would buy more stuff. (not incidentally then my readers will get more news.) The more locals, like me and the other reporters, buy stuff locally, the more the other businesses have improving finances.
Like I said before… I only come up on your site for the ads. I’m still waiting for the spot remover on my arm to work like the picture. I’m not touching the pink pudding stuff advertised! The other aspects like reporting on fires, car crashes, impending weather debacles, protests and “face tat alerts” are just added imagery.
Ok, let’s use your rationale. I don’t like paying for PG&E for anybody except myself. Why should I care if the line to your house goes down in a storm? I’m not using that particular line; therefore, I don’t want any of my added fees going towards it. See how silly that sounds?
You can stop waiting now if you’d like.
Oh, wise one. How many elec companies provides service to Garberville and Redway? Compared to how many internet providers are available?
How many grants does PG&E get? Plus PG&E won’t run lines to the back country. People have to make their own electricity.
And you are right, Those lines that might have gone down, never existed in the first place. See how silly that sounds?
Ernie….that silly analogy comment wasn’t even aimed at you. It was intentionally absurd.
Well, opinions aside, with alternatives like Frontier or HughesNet, you’re lucky if they work at all on any given day, regardless of the weather. Or politics. I will tell you this, outside of the price (which varies depending on your service level and if you got the no-upfront-equipment-charges special) 17ms latency, average of 360mb/s d/l with 55-60 upload, 0.2% packet loss with partial obstructions is not too shabby for my middle-of-nowhere SL terminal. Some days I get over 400. When the weather is really crap, I’m still well over 200. I also have unlimited data, so no, it is not low.
Until Vero can get to my home day, part of that “last mile” initiative, I use what I can get. My SL bill is about $60 less than my Optimum bill. I have a house of heavy users, so I pay for the upper tiers. If Amazon’s Kuiper can get up and running this year at a better value for the same, I’ll jump to it. “Last mile” connections are going to mean that some folks are going to need a half mile or more of private fiber line to get connected. That isn’t covered by these “grants” that pay for people to sit and think about things.
Also, the hills are very prone to power outages from incidents that happen miles away. Case in point, the main line that comes out of Garberville/Redway out to Petrolia is problematic. If anything in G’ville blinks on or off, the entire Mattole goes dark, save for a couple of short lines in the area. This is where fiber is not helpful, as even if you have a generator for your end-points, the far-off nodes you connect to are offline. And so are you. Hope you like dial-up if you even have a modem that can still do that. Oh wait, Frontier is offline then too. “Last mile” generally means your property, not necessarily to your dwelling.
Satellite works out there. It’s not dependent on outside energy sources to run. As long as you have solar, a generator, and/or even battery backups, you’re fine, and can make wi-fi calls if you have an emergency or need to have your phone stay connected to the world.
But hey, by all means, if you think it has lousy latency and low data for your gaming needs, sit and wait a couple of years, and maybe somebody will string a fiber line to your house. Meanwhile, I’m scooting right along, no glitches.
Why CPH has had such a lousy video experience could be a number of things. If anything, it should exceed even home users, as all this connectivity effort was initially targeted towards the government, public safety, and education. In my experience, it’s usually the computer or terminal or device I’m on that’s the sluggish one, or even a crap video processor. The internet part is fine; it’s the equipment. But I’m not the IT person, so I don’t know other than they have real issues.
Buy Lora modules and build out one of the three options for decentralized comms. Everything else is a honeypot and being spied on to make sure your not an anti war crazy or something, palantir and the ADL….
https://youtu.be/me6W1mKIjr8?si=6-YnmmDG0UrBpjwW
LoRa (short for Long Range) is super slow. Data rates range from the sub 100bps to maybe 10kbps. The farther apart the two LoRa modules are the lower the carrier frequency needs to be so that lowers the data rate. Try downloading a picture at those speeds and see how long it takes – forget about video. That technology is best used for sensor data.
We live in a time when most anything associated with Cal Poly Humboldt has a “ghostly look.”
Ghastly too.
Connie mostly lives in Florida these days, which might explain the unstable internet …
Your concerns about investment are understandable. I think Kym clarified this in her later comments, but let’s explore some of them in this thread.
My understanding is that these funds are dedicated for the purpose of composing plans to provide internet to rural unserved and underserved communities within our county. This often includes funding for things like environmental studies, as well as project feasibility studies. (Think about it this way: “Can we afford do this?” “How much is it going to cost long term?” “What impact will it have on resources?”) Answering those questions in advance of applying for construction funds is prudent. Now, regarding your endorsement of Starlink: As much as we wish LEO satellite could resolve connectivity issues – there are a number of barriers that make it a less than reliable option for rural communities long term. As a taxpayer and rural resident- I prefer that my tax dollar investments serve the communities over not just months or years, but decades. Latency, affordability, and singular network access points mean that if we rely solely upon LEO satellite alone, we are leaving our communities at a potential economic disadvantage. It’s not a bad option, but it shouldn’t be the only one.
Comparatively, fiber optic infrastructure adds multiple channels for network connectivity, greater conductivity for higher speeds/lower latency, and is considered a longer-term solution. Right now, there are communities with 20+ yr old fiber that hasn’t needed to be updated/ripped out and repaired. So, why would we not want our communities to explore technological options that have built-in failsafes for a more robust network and a longer lasting legacy with less cost?