Navajo County Seeks $ 25 Million Grant To Boost Broadband In White Mountains | Apache County

HOLBROOK – Navajo County recently put the finishing touches to an ambitious plea for $ 25 million in federal funding to improve broadband speed and reliability in the county’s southern reaches.

Meanwhile, Arizona Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly announced nearly $ 1 billion in federal grants to improve broadband coverage on reservations – including the sprawling Navajo reservation that includes northern Navajo and Apache counties.

The two announcements represent solid progress in Navajo County’s efforts to lay the foundation for a fast, reliable Internet network that economic development officials see as key to the region’s economic future. Navajo County recently hired a consultant to develop a broadband master plan that would extend coverage to isolated communities, eliminating the slow speeds and frequent, prolonged outages that plagued the current system.

Currently, much of the Navajo Reservation has no broadband coverage at all. In addition, all of the White Mountains are at the end of a long, fragile internet cul-de-sac.

A break in the fiber optic cables anywhere along the way can affect the coverage of the entire area for long periods of time. The county wants both a higher capacity cable and a broadband loop so that the internet signal can be redirected immediately in the event of an interruption.

In June, the board of directors, working with Sparklight – also known as CableOne – approved a $ 25 million grant application.

“Navajo County is currently in the process of implementing a broadband strategy plan process that has also identified the need for additional redundancy in the region. Frequent outages due to fiber optic cuts have created a number of issues including compromising the county’s public safety communications, disrupting business operations, and residents’ access to critical services, ”the grant application stated.

The area fire currently threatening Heber has underscored the danger. Most of the people in the fast-growing Heber and Overgaard communities don’t have internet access at all, making it much more difficult for them to keep track of the danger when the fire approaches or get emergency notifications from the sheriff. A failure would even paralyze first aiders who also rely on the Internet.

In light of these issues, the county is proposing to add a state-owned middle mile backbone to the existing privately owned middle mile infrastructure that will provide redundancy for the county’s population centers, including Heber-Overgaard, Holbrook, Snowflake and Show Low . “According to the application.

The first part of the grant would create a new 40 mile long, county owned “middle mile” line between Heber and Holbrook to connect to two separate existing private lines. This would create a triangular broadband loop to protect the entire region – including Show Low, Snowflake, Pinetop, and other communities – from outages caused by a single line break. So if the existing Sparklight line were cut up by a bulldozer or a flood, or even a quick-chewing ground squirrel, customers wouldn’t lose any service. This county-owned new line would cost approximately $ 14.5 million, with the county paying about 10% of the cost and the federal government paying 90%.

The second part of the grant would provide a national broadband network in Heber-Overgaard, where only about 29% of the population have access to the internet. The project would include approximately 114 miles of new cable and provide Internet services to approximately 994 households, 20 businesses, county facilities, fire stations and a Summit Health Clinic.

The project would include buried underground cables around the edge of Heber and Overgaard, as well as above-ground wires attached to pylons along all major roads. The cost of the Heber network is approximately $ 11.1 million, according to the grant application.

Officials for the county’s economic development said providing a reliable internet that can support teleworking, home working, telemedicine, internet sales for local businesses, and rapidly growing consumer demand for fast, high-speed services remains key to future economic growth in the county. The pandemic has underscored the importance of the internet for medicine, education and business. This is especially true in rural areas as people who have worked from home during the pandemic are rethinking whether they want to continue living in expensive, overcrowded urban centers.

The pandemic has also lost money to improve broadband service for reservations. The Navajo reservation was among the hardest hit areas in the country, in part because many people have no water or electricity, let alone internet that would allow it to function during the lockdown.

Kelly and Sinema campaigned for the Biden government to include funds to improve broadband in rural areas – especially reservations – into the American Rescue Act’s Pandemic Stimulus Act. This included $ 7 billion in support of distance learning programs for schools and $ 300 million in rural broadband deployment through public and private partnerships, and $ 1 billion in tribal areas through national telecommunications and information systems grants.

“Today’s grant funding expands broadband access to tribal areas,” Sinema said in a press release, “and promotes jobs and education through critical investments to bridge the digital divide.”

Kelly commented, “This is a much needed tribal broadband investment to ensure that more small businesses, schools and families in tribal areas can access reliable broadband and critical economic and educational opportunities as our economy continues to recover from this pandemic. “

Peter Aleshire covers county government and other issues for the Independent. He is the former editor of the Payson Roundup. Reach out to him at [email protected]