BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
GREEN COVE SPRINGS— Clay County Commissioners told its staff to begin negotiations with Comcast to get broadband internet services to the rural areas of the county.
During a Feb. 8 commission meeting, the panel reviewed five bids for the project.
Comcast said it could deliver a fiber network to the county’s 17,000 residents who do not now have the service for a cost of $10 million to the county. Comcast added that it would invest $4 million of its own money into the project.
Assistant County Manager Troy Nagle told commissioners that county funding was needed to give companies an incentive to extend their networks to rural areas.
“We are providing a mechanism to incentivize companies to go down a dirt road, where there may be, as my parents live on, 15 people living along a two-mile dirt road,” he said. “It’s cost-prohibitive to go down that road if there’s not some subsidy, funding mechanism to assist with that.”
Two more companies submitted bids for a fiber optic network. AT&T asked for $27.4 million to do the work. It said it would also invest the same amount into the project.
Tilson offered to cover the areas of Middleburg, Clay Hill and Virginia Village for $61 million, leaving the Lake Region out of its proposal.
Commissioner Wayne Bolla reminded viewers of the county commission meeting that although the county is fronting money into the building of the network, users will still have to pay for the service.
“You’re still going to have to pay something for the internet service if you choose to buy it,” he said. We’re not talking about completely free internet here.”
Under the Comcast proposal, residents would be offered a basic broadband service of 50 megabytes-per-second downloads and 10 MBps up for $9.95 a month. Users could also upgrade to 100 MBps down and 10 MBps up for $29.95 a month and to 600/20 MBps for $99 a month.
Congresswoman Kat Cammack, who has been working to provide broadband internet to rural areas, has said she does not support any service slower than one gigabyte up and 100 megabytes down. The Comcast proposal falls short of that standard.
Two other firms offered to bring broadband internet to rural Clay County using a network based on radio waves.
SBA submitted a bid that included a county cost of $6.8 million and a vendor cost of $4 million.
Smart North Florida also included a radio-wave network with a county cost of $2 million and an unknown vendor cost.
Nagle told commissioners that state and federal grant agencies prefer fiber optic networks over those based on radio waves.
Commissioner Mike Cella added that while fiber networks are more expensive and take longer to deploy, they deliver much faster speeds.
