8.c IAC Report for City CouncilIAC Report for City Council 8-18-2020
Scandia MidCo Construction Update:
Overall underground work is at 41,568’ (8 miles) complete out of 92,807’ (17.5 miles) or 45% complete.
We expect all underground work will be complete by September 15th and all 6 nodes will be active and
ready for customers by October 15th at the latest; provided there are no material or weather-related
delays.
We’re on target to have people get service by the end of October. That’s 240 households (500
residents) with access to high speed Internet with 1 Gig Down and 20 Mb Up that didn’t have it before.
I drove all the expansions areas yesterday and the progress is looking good. By the way, this
construction is referred to as Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). MidCo runs fiber to within 1000 feet of the
customer premises and then converts to a coaxial cable.
New Grant Applications:
We’ve made it past the first internal review as MidCo prepares its DEED grant applications for this fall.
MidCo starts with about 30 targeted projects then further reduces that to 12 projects. We’re currently
in that group of 12.
The areas of this new DEED grant application are still under evaluation but will by necessity be adjacent
to existing MidCo infrastructure to keep deployment costs to a reasonable level.
Last Friday MidCo was required to inform competitors in the area of their intent to file for another
grant. In our case that’s Frontier.
MidCo will continue their internal process going to 6 candidate projects to submit to DEED this
September (this was the same process as last year).
Ultimately DEED approved 2 of the 6 MidCo projects last year, one of them being Scandia’s. Once again,
our monetary participation in these grants has been an important factor increasing our chance of
success.
MidCo is also working on a federal grant for our area. This is part of the FCC’s Rural Digital
Opportunities Fund (RDOF). There is no need for Scandia to contribute money for these grants. We will
not know the results of this process until late October. The areas eligible for this grant are available at
the FCC RDOF page here:
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/auction-904-preliminary-eligible-areas/
Submitted by:
Robert Wilmers
Chair
Scandia Internet Action Committee