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Public encouraged to take survey to determine if their areas have received funding for broadband
By Ena Sellers, Duplin Journal
KENANSVILLE – FOCUS Broadband to begin high-speed Internet fiber optic infrastructure construction near Chinquapin, Maready, Cypress Creek, Jackson Crossroads, Quinns Store, and Pin Hook in the spring.
According to Jody Heustess, Focus Broadband VP of marketing & customer care, by the end of 2024, Focus Broadband is expected to have built a total of 190 miles of high-speed Internet fiber optic infrastructure across Duplin County.
Broadband Internet is now available for some addresses in the Old NC Highway 903 and South NC Highway 11-903 area between Magnolia and Kenansville. Near Carr Town Drive and South NC Highway 50 between Minnie Farrior Lane and Wallace Family Lane, parts of Hargroves Drive and Pasture Branch Road in Greenevers, and parts of East Sampson Street and Blind Bridge Road in Magnolia and near James Barnette Lane.
For the past 65 years the company has been focused on building access to broadband in areas identified by the state as under-served, Heustess told the Duplin Journal. Adding that most of the funding came from the Growing Rural Economies through Access to Technology (NC-GREAT).
“In 2020, Focus Broadband built 59 miles of high-speed Internet fiber optic infrastructure to pass 423 addresses, contributing more than $1.2 million to that project. In 2021, we won a second grant to build 58 more miles of fiber – that was a $2 million project, we put in $600,000, and the grant covered $1.4 million, roughly, and that was to cover 600 more addresses… In 2022, we won a third grant, that was to put in 73 miles of fiber, that is almost a $4.6 million dollar project,” said Heustess, adding that the grant covers $3.9 million. Focus Broadband covered $535,000 and the county covered $150,000 to make high-speed Internet available to 972 addresses.
According to Heustess, they hope to finish building the last portion by the end of the year.
“That’s what we’re starting to work on now, and I hope by the end of the year, we’ve gotten most of that knocked out,” said Heustess.
Heustess added that the first customers would likely be “around the Maple Hill area, we are going to connect our network from Pender County up into Duplin there, and those will be the first ones to come up. We are still having some design work in the areas that are further north around Beulaville, but once that design work is finished, we would also go ahead and try to put some separate crews working up there, so we would attack it from the south to the north, and the north to the south.”
When asked how they are serving farmers, Heustess shared that their service can be used to monitor chicken and hog houses.
“Farmers have very specific needs… but there is a lot of stuff that can be done using an Internet connection to help monitor those houses. Having the Internet there allows them to put cameras in, so that they can look in on it remotely at any point. You can monitor temperature, you can monitor humidity, any of the monitoring technologies that they would have that they would be able to use if they had the Internet. Our Internet access makes those things possible, and we have seen a lot of that happen after we put the Internet to a place where people want to connect grow houses,” said Heustess.
“In terms of a farmer and a tractor out in a field, that’s sort of a different animal because the Internet that we provide is to a point, but it is not ubiquitous Wi-Fi. Tractors use a different kind of Internet from satellites or cellular to do field mapping,” he explained.
We’ve made the Internet available to farmers’ homes, to where they can get crop reports, check weather, and do all kinds of things, maybe, download software for a tractor… because a lot of tractors use software and plug in to the Internet and do it that way.”
Heustess explained if there is a structure at an address point, they can provide broadband to it. “Let’s say that you had a big greenhouse… We can provide Internet to the structure for that greenhouse to have Internet access inside of it… What ours does not necessarily do, is if you have a field that is surrounded by nothing.”
Heustess explained that they do not serve the entire county. ”There are still unserved areas in Duplin County that remain. There’s fewer now than there used to be,” said Heustess, adding that the state is rolling out additional grant programs like the Completing Access to Broadband program that are available this year.
“There are other programs coming that will be funded by federal dollars,” said Heustess. “We’ll continue to look at those funding opportunities and to see if there are additional places in Duplin County that conceivably need service and try to put together applications to serve them.”
Heustess added that there are places in the county that may still be unserved and may not have had any grant money awarded because they were not part of an application.
The public can access information that shows where broadband grants have been awarded through the North Carolina Department of Information Technology at https://www.nconemap.gov/
The site has a NC broadband funding map, a CAB planning tool, and a broadband survey, that people can use to look up their address and find out if funding has been made available for their area and if it is marked for development. Heustess recommends for those who are unserved to take the survey to let folks know their area is unserved.
“And that way it hits the map and providers are able to see, and the county is able to see it,” said Heustess, explaining that the Federal Communications Commission defines a connection faster than 25/3 megabits per second as broadband Internet, therefore an area with less than that, it would show as unserved “and that address becomes eligible for funding.”
In Duplin, an estimated 637, or 2.4% of households have taken the broadband survey, 78% have less than 25 Mbps/3 Mbps and 60% have less than 10 Mbps/1 Mbps, 298 have no wired Internet and 13 have no Internet at all.
Visit FasterDuplin.com to view FOCUS Broadband service map in Duplin County.
