The Development Authority of the North Country is planning a project to improve broadband internet capability in Alexandria Bay, Ogdensburg, Massena, Canton and Gouverneur.
Pandemic highlights broadband gaps in Adirondacks
Where corporations fall short, neighbors and smaller companies have gotten inventive
Tim Rowland Adirondack Explorer
FacebookTwitterEmail
Janelle Schwartz works at Craigardan, an Elizabethtown-area nonprofit where employees must ration their use of satellite internet. (Mike Lynch/Adirondack Explorer)Adirondack Explorer
ESSEX COUNTY To Mike Hopmeier, it felt like an old-time country barn-raising.
Hopmeier is president of a northern Virginia counterterrorism consulting firm who turned a Cold War thermonuclear missile site in the Adirondacks into a research laboratory. Not surprisingly, Hopmeier needed bandwidth, and lots of it.
But when Spectrum checked out his location on a lonely road south of the mountain called Poke-O-Moonshine, the company gave him an estimate of $50,000 to a lay a half-mile of fiber to his lab. Hopmeier figured there had to be a better way.
Rather than enhance broadband coverage, state mandates imposed upon internet providers will likely suppress efforts to ensure everyone has access.
As part of the 2021-22 state budget approved and signed into law last week, lawmakers included a provision that compels internet providers to offer services to eligible low-income families for $15 per month. This applies to companies with at least 20,000 subscribers.
âNew York broadband providers are slow to react to the details of a new state program requiring mid-sized and large companies to provide internet service for low-income families for $15 per month,â according to a story published Saturday by the Watertown Daily Times. âThe stateâs historic $212 billion budget, which the Legislature adopted nearly a week late Wednesday night, mandated a new program requiring companies that provide internet connection to 20,000 households or more to offer broadband service of at least 25 Mbps at the discounted rate of $15 pe
Cornell: Building Networks Not Enough to Expand Rural Broadband insurancenewsnet.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from insurancenewsnet.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Even when grants fund network construction, high operating costs pose significant challenges for rural broadband cooperatives seeking to expand access, according to new research from the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.