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Escambia County Takes Next Step Toward Broadband Internet Network; Thousands Could Get True High Speed Access
July 13, 2021
Escambia County is moving forward with plans toward a countywide broadband network following a study that found the county has large high speed internet gaps.
A late 2020 assessment by Magellan Advisors found that almost all residents in the more northern parts of Escambia County do not have any access to the internet at speeds defined as broadband by the Federal Communications Commission.
The Escambia County Commission recently voted unanimously enter into a contract with Magellan for $645,000 in CARES Act funding for design engineering, detailed business and financial planning, along with grant services and applications in a major step toward a county broadband network. It essentially will create a plan for moving forward if commissioners later determine the network is financially feasible.
“I want to thank my colleagues for continuing to support the expansion of broadband internet into the unserved, as well as the underserved areas of Escambia County,” District 5 Commissioner Steven Barry said. “Even though the franchising and licensing of cable and internet companies is not an Escambia County government right or responsibility, I have thousands of constituents whose quality of life, work and education is negatively impacted by the quality of their internet connection, so it is a huge priority of mine.
The earlier study identified about 3,000 underserved or unserved residents without access to true broadband in North Escambia. After the planning, the next step in the project outlined by Magellan Advisors would be a fiber based wireless network in North Escambia in areas from Molino north (pictured above). That move would take additional action by the commission in coming months.
The Wi-Fi type network would immediately offer high speed internet to 3,000 underserved North Escambia residents Costs have been initially estimated at $79 per month for a speed of 150/50 Mbps. Additional fiber connections up to a symmetrical (same upload and download speed) 1 Gigabit would also become available.
None of those North Escambia residents currently have access to the federally defined minimum broadband speed of 25/3 Mbps.
“While I do not know exactly what the solution looks like yet, I am confident that we are going to put something together that will work well for all of Escambia County, especially District 5,” Barry told NorthEscambia.com. “It is the type of project which can truly change people’s lives forever.”
Magellan Advisors of Denver, Colorado, was selected from five submitted. The company has done similar work in Florida for 25 governmental clients including Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Seminole County.
The company estimates it will take about five months to deliver a final design and road map, including a business plan, engineering design and deployment road map.
Comments
24 Responses to “Escambia County Takes Next Step Toward Broadband Internet Network; Thousands Could Get True High Speed Access”
Streaming MM and My little Pony in HD will be so much better . This is great news.
@Mike
When you say a “really good computer” are you just referring to those people that just don’t have a computer (i.e. those at poverty level)? Otherwise, the spec of your computer has practically no affect on your upload/download speed from your ISP.
There are some caveats over wi-fi. I suppose if your computer is old enough and you’re running on 802.11b then you won’t see a speed increase if you’re at 10Mbps right now, but any newer wi-fi card and you’re good. And if you’re running over ethernet (directly wired in) then you wouldn’t have to worry about it anyway.
hope this includes East on Quintette Hwy.
The north end of SRC could use something too.
What do you mean by a “really good computer”? It doesn’t take anything that great. I’ve got a laptop from 2011 that I had a reimaged and a solid state HD put into. Cost me under $100 for the upgrade and it will boot up, connect to a high speed internet network and load multiple webpages in under one minute, if I’m on top of my click game that day.
You don’t need anything special. As long as your machine isn’t burdened with malware and adware, it’ll be fine.
I hope it will be available off of fanning road. We need some good internet this way really bad!
“High speed takes a really good computer to be able to get real high speed and most won’t have that.”
That is not a correct statement.
High speed takes a really good computer to be able to get real high speed and most won’t have that. And so the high speed aspect will not be used by most, but I guess it is good to have access to it.
Is there a key to this map? What is indicated by the green, red, blue circles?
Waste of money. Starlink will be available sooner if not already and without the County investing in infrastructure and continuous maintenance. This is a PR stunt.
Would be nice to have service along Perdido River in Beulah.
Please ask them to look at the sw of escambia county. We only have access to Hughes net and it is terrible
It would be great to get something faster and enough data to not run out before the end of the month. I live on West Highway 4 in Byrneville and the only service available is satellite internet. We pay for the highest package at $160/month for 12mbps unlimited but after 100GB of use you will be prioritized behind other customers during network congestion.
It would be great if the infrastructure opens up to several isp providers so competitive pricing is availible in my location I have but one option no choice and I doubt the best price for the service. (not mentioning any brand names but pretty obvious).Unfortunatly the story does not shed any light on such as to what providers are involved hopefully more than one or it will not truly be of best benifit other than addition of a high priced service that you can opt for not a choice.
So does this open the doors for larger Cable companies now, like Cox ,ATT, Comcast,to where we have a choice of which company we want to use are we it go to Spectrum? We have Spectrum now, and if we’re lucky we have internet 20 to 25 days a month, cause it’s always going out, and than to have MetroPCS as my phone carrier leaves me without phone service so I really hope this happens soon.
I guess they’ve never heard of Starlink.
That would be wonderful. We in the north end of the county pay taxes just like the citizens on the south end of the county. We should be afforded good internet like everyone else.
If this actually comes to fruition, kudos to the County Commissioner Steven Barry. Don’t give up the fight. This has been a long time coming.
Thank you.
Would be nice if Santa Rosa BoCC would look into this rather than spend their time passing ridiculous noise ordinances and rubber-stamping zone changes in wetlands for developers.
Too little, too late.
I’ve signed up for Starlink and feel it will be worth the investment for me personally.
I don’t trust any local ‘net providers because they’ve proven they don’t care and have demanded ridiculous prices for lousy service for 15 years.
So it looks like the left pink line is Hwy 97. What if we’re just left of that line (i.e. Walnut Hill area). Would we will still be left out of this, or would we be in range of their WI-FI signal? I’m assuming that’s just where they would be running their network and it’s not just people inside that “circle”, but people inside and out as long as they get a signal.
It doesn’t mention if those plans are Unlimited or if they have data caps. Those speeds sound great, but if they have 50GB data caps then it’s still pointless. Between video calls, work, steaming shows, we can burn through the Viasat 100GB cap in a week if we try, under 2 weeks if we don’t try.
I have Frontier here in Walnut Hill and it’s slow DSL. It would be bearable but they reboot their hardware or something 1 to 3 times a day. I just lose connection out of nowhere and I have to reboot to get a connection back. Its horrible because I am still working from home.
Now this is good news. Great for the north end of the county which is very rural.
Think it will make it into the Alabama side? We can’t get a decent landline/dialup service either Frontier has all but abandoned even low-grade service out here for the last 5-10 years. The humming in the lines hurts your ears to use the phone, it forced us to get cell phones. Glad to see ya’ll are going to get better services available to you.
Anything besides Spectrum would be great.