Sitting down in front of your computer surfing the web, using your smartphone or tablet to post to social media, or turning on your favorite streaming video service for a movie with lightning fast internet speeds has become second nature to most of the world. This, however, is not the case in some rural communities in America. This has been changing since the 2009 Recovery Act was passed into law. Rural communities have steadily been getting the opportunity to join the urban core and experience broadband speeds from their internet provider.
Although the process of getting broadband internet into these communities is time-consuming and very costly the value of doing it is worth the price. This opportunity for the rural community to have consistent broadband internet speeds is not just about being able to sit down and stream a movie instantly or post a pic to Facebook. Having reliable fast internet will alter the way that the community farms, run businesses, and educate the children of these communities.
On February 17th, 2009 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed into law, the Broadband initiative was among the programs being funded by the Recover and Reinvestment Act. This initiative was designed to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, rural areas (Federal Communications Commission, 2016). With the passing of this act, nearly 7 million rural residents received access to better quality and more reliable internet.
With the act in place, my home state of Missouri applied and received from the act $142. illion to lay 2,500 miles of fiber optic cable and construct 200 new broadband towers throughout the state of Missouri. I have been fortunate enough to be involved in the placing of that fiber throughout the state’s rural communities since the beginning of the program. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2015 voted to change the definition of broadband internet from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps download speed and changed the upload speed to 3 Mbps from 1Mbps (Pramuk, 2015).
Existing copper telephone cable is currently used to bring the internet into the home if fiber is not available, this method of receiving the internet is outdated and unreliable in rural communities that have not had any updates to the telephone exchanges. Once this fiber is brought into these rural communities; schools, businesses, and farming changes dramatically. Going into a rural hardware store that has a slow internet connection is very painful, to say the least. Standing at the counter or waiting in line for the credit card machine to load and accept the payment is excruciating.
With a broadband connection brought in with fiber this is no longer the case and you can sail through the checkout process just like you would if you were at a big box retailer in the city. The farmers in rural communities will be able to take advantage of having broadband internet as well. With more bandwidth and faster internet, they will be able to remotely monitor crops and livestock by setting up a network of monitoring stations using the amount of bandwidth allowed with fiber. Schools in these communities will benefit greatly by having a fiber-based network.
Having a fast network will allow students and teachers to connect with facilities and other teachers around the world (MoBroadbandNow, 2016). Getting the fiber to the rural areas is a challenging process, imagine a network of highway and interstate systems underground and on power poles and that is the way a network is setup. Currently, I am involved in a project in Northwest Missouri that is bringing fiber to rural communities. This project is a total of 400 miles of fiber optic cable serving two different town exchanges.
The first exchange was a town called Parnell it has a population of 190 people, the second exchange is for a town called Ravenwood, it is bigger than Parnell with 440 resident’s living inside the city limits. There are two other exchanges involved to complete the 400 miles but they are being constructed by another contractor. The first step to starting off an exchange project like this is to begin at the Central Office or (CO) for short, every town has one and most likely it is a white square unassuming building with possibly a fence around one side with a generator in it.
The CO is where all of the copper telephone cables break down and create the actual network. To update a system to fiber this is where the fiber will begin and end. There are several different methods of placing the fiber and each has their advantages and disadvantages. The first method and typically always used inside city limits is called Horizontal Directional Drilling, this is a trenchless method of boring steel rods underground and pulling back either the fiber itself or a vessel for the fiber to be placed in at a later time such as interduct, a hollow pipe that allows the fiber pulled in using a rope or string.
This method is nice to use in town because of less clean-up and it allows you to get from one point to the next without having to tear anyone’s driveway or yard up in the process. Using this method you must be experienced and good at judging distances and grades or you will likely cut other utilities which will become extremely costly and possibly very dangerous. The next method we use is using a cable plow, essentially it is a bulldozer with a big tooth with a channel in the middle that goes into the ground and places the fiber at the bottom of the rip the tooth makes as it is pulled through the ground by the bulldozer.
This method is called using a plow train; a plow train will typically consist of 10-15 employees doing various jobs behind the plow such as: setting pedestals, setting handhold vaults, cleaning up the mess that the dozers have made from plowing, and setting warning buried fiber optic signs along the path the fiber takes. These two methods are used the majority of the time to place the main line of fiber that is going to feed the communities.
The method to get the fiber to the home (FTTH) is by using a piece of machine called a maxi sneaker. This machine is a miniature cable plow that has 4 tires and a tooth that vibrates at an extremely fast rate of speed to allow the tooth to slide through the customer’s yard making the least amount of damage possible. Once the fiber is plowed to the house they will attach a piece of hardware onto the side of the house and a splicing crew will take over from that point on.
My favorite part of my job is when we plow or bore next to a house and the owners come out and start asking questions about what we are doing and what exactly is fiber and what does it do. I love explaining to these people about the change in service they are going to be receiving once the copper service is switched over to the new broadband fiber network. Even the hardest old timers are excited for the change in reliability that broadband fiber will bring to their home.