A $4.4 million grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will allow local telecommunications provider ETC to expand its broadband internet service to several areas of the county that are considered underserved.
ETC’s receipt of the ReConnect Grant was announced last Friday during a reception at the Clear Creek Agricultural Education Center attended by multiple Georgia politicians and department directors, as well as ETC management and staff members.
“It’s the first time they’ve had this grant. We applied last year and were successful in our application. The total project is estimated at $5.9 million. The way the grant works is that USDA funds 75 percent, which is $4.4 million, and ETC funds 25 percent, which is just shy of $1.5 million,” said Jason Smith, ETC’s chief operating officer.
At the grant announcement event, Joyce White, state director of USDA Rural Development, said 24 farms, 25 businesses, 2,159 households, two critical community facilities and one educational facility are in the areas that will receive the broadband infrastructure improvements.
“That internet service will help the poultry farms in this area greatly. They need it to be competitive with the rest of the world,” she added.
The expanded broadband service will be provided through fiber-optic connections. New fiber-optic service lines will be run to pockets of the county that are now only able to receive DSL service, Smith said. Those include parts of Pleasant Gap, Mountaintown, Burnt Mountain, Ebenezer and Coosawattee River Resort.
The average construction cost for the grant-funded project is $65,000 per mile, Smith said.
“It will be about 90 miles of new main line construction and about that much more in surface drops — the wire from the pole to the house. There may be 3 or 4 miles (in one community) and 3 or 4 in another,” he added. “The grant defines that it has to be fixed broadband, not a cellular provider. It can’t be a hotspot. It has to be a fixed service with a wire connected to it. It will be a complete fiber build and a fiber connection straight to the house. We will have tiers of speed that go all the way up to 1 gig, which will be a huge step forward.”
Per grant guidelines, five years are allowed to finish the project, which will be completed in phases.
“We hope to do it in less time than that. We want to make sure people understand it won’t happen overnight. We’ll be bringing customers online as soon as we can,” Smith emphasized.
Fiber-optic broadband provides a faster internet experience than either DSL or cable connections, but it’s still a relatively new service for the local company.
“We offer fiber in a few portions of the county right now (like) some new build areas and places we’ve been able to have agreements with property owner associations,” Smith said.
The grant can only be used to serve areas that currently have no other access to high-speed internet, he added.
“We won’t be able to deploy it to any areas that currently have coax (cable internet) service,” Smith confirmed.
The new infrastructure will also allow ETC to offer other services to certain areas.
“Currently, all these customers would not have the ability to subscribe to our video (cable TV), but they may be able to subscribe to a satellite service,” Smith said. “For example, right now in the half of Coosawattee we currently do not serve, nobody can subscribe to ETC’s video product because we don’t deliver it across copper. We can deliver it across fiber.”
Since the USDA ReConnect program began, more than $512 million in grant and loan funding has been distributed to 54 high-speed internet infrastructure projects. White said the program is part of a $1 billion allocation by the Trump administration to expand high-speed internet service in the nation’s rural communities.
“They have come up with different loans and grants. One of those is the ReConnect program. Last year, President Trump set aside $600 million for that endeavor and this year about the same. The application window is still open and it ends March 16. I would like to see Georgia get a lot of those dollars,” she added.
At the announcement event, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston said the expansion of broadband service is a step toward “young people in Gilmer County and other parts of rural Georgia (having) the same opportunities as young people in the metro and suburban areas.”
“There are a lot of pieces that go into that — transportation, education, healthcare. It turned out we realized that a real foundational piece of that was high-speed broadband. That is a part of everything we do. It serves education. It serves business. It serves agriculture,” he added.
Group photo: In front, from left, ETC shareholder Marianne Harrison Bowman, company CEO and shareholder John Harrison and wife, Cathy Harrison, display a commendation from the office of Gov. Brian Kemp following the announcement of a $4.4 million USDA grant that will be used to expand the company’s broadband internet service. Also pictured, in back from left: Andrew Hayes, USDA field representative; Joyce White, state director USDA Rural Development; Lauren “Bubba” McDonald, Georgia Public Service Commission chairman; Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, Sen. Steve Gooch, Christopher Nunn, Georgia Department of Community Affairs commissioner; Beatrice Shakal, office of Sen. David Perdue; Brad Hughes, office of Gov. Kemp; Cora Payne, ETC executive secretary; Frankie Rigdon, ETC vice president of operations; Darrell Harper, ETC vice president of finance and administration and Jason Smith, ETC chief operating officer.