Broadband expansion under way

May 2—VALDOSTA — Officials symbolically broke ground Thursday on a massive expansion of broadband internet in Lowndes County.

Representatives of the Lowndes County government, Kinetic by Windstream, Colquitt EMC and the state broadband office tossed dirt in the air at Clyattville Community Park to celebrate the start of construction on a project that will bring internet service to an estimated 16,000 Lowndes County residences and businesses.

Construction has already started, according to Michael Foor, Kinetic's president of Georgia operations, but areas will be phased in as they are completed over time.

"We're targeting July 1 to start turning them on," he said.

The contract with the state says the last locations must be connected by 2026, Foor said, but he said the company plans to work aggressively and be done well before then.

The project is a public-private partnership that includes Kinetic, Colquitt EMC and Lowndes County, as well as millions of dollars in federal funding distributed by the State of Georgia as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, a law passed in March 2021 to provide financial relief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The $39 million project in Lowndes County includes $21.7 million from ARPA plus $17.6 million invested by Kinetic. It is the second-largest broadband grant distributed by the State of Georgia, according to Jessica Simmons, the state broadband director.

Foor said some of the people who'll be affected by this project have no internet at all now, while others have service that provides speeds in the 25-megabyte range. This project will involve laying 806 miles of fiberoptic cable, taking fiberoptic all the way to the residence or business, he said. That will result in upload and download speeds of at least a gigabyte for all customers, and some areas might be able to handle even faster speeds.

Speakers at Thursday's event described how critical internet access has become to residents' quality of life.

"The [COVID] pandemic brought a lot of the issues we have, it brought it to the top," Lowndes County Commission Chairman Bill Slaughter said.

In particular, he pointed to schools moving classes online. He said children who didn't have internet access weren't able to get an education because they couldn't get online when they needed to.

He compared today's need for internet access to the rural electrification of the 1940s. "You needed to have lights so you could read," he said.

It was a connection made by others before him. Georgia lawmakers passed Senate Bill 2 in 2019 to allow electric membership cooperatives — the groups that brought electricity to rural Georgia — to participate in the expansion of internet access too. That law opened the door for the partnership between Kinetic and Colquitt EMC that was then able to take advantage of the ARPA grants when they became available, according to Danny Nichols, President and CEO of Colquitt EMC.