Sikora: Broadband investment will bring homes online in 2025

Yahoo

18-05-2025

May 17—MORGANTOWN — Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora said he expects the county's broadband projects to start bringing people online this year.
The commission used approximately $8 million of its $20.6 million American Rescue Plan Act dollars to leverage more than $20 million in broadband projects by partnering with Internet service providers Comcast and Frontier.
Sikora said both ISPs are moving forward as planned and on schedule, noting the deadline to expend those ARPA dollars is Dec. 31, 2026.
"But we expect significant progress in 2025, and certainly by spring of 2026 a lot of these projects should be nearing completion. Of course, we allow some slack in there to allow for any unforeseen issues, " he said. "The Frontier project, I mean, we're already having reports of people seeing them doing the work in the Halleck Road area. So it's out there and people are noticing it."
The commission has a total of five deployment projects in process — one with Frontier and four with Comcast. Those projects will deploy a total of 223.5 miles of fiber optic cable and provide connections for an estimated 2, 550 addresses.
The Frontier project Sikora referenced will use about 11.4 miles of cable to provide connection opportunities for some 250 homes in the area of Gladesville and Halleck roads.
The largest of the public /private endeavors was announced in June, when the commission said it was putting up just under $6 million to pull in an $11.84 million investment from Comcast to connect more than 2, 100 homes and businesses.
While the project will touch unserved and underserved areas across the county, there's a particular emphasis on the western end, which has the greatest number of dark zones.
Comcast also has smaller projects in the areas of Stewarts Run, River Road, and Gandalf Road (Snake Hill).
Ricky Frazier Jr., senior vice president of Comcast's Keystone Region, said work is underway.
"Comcast has started work on several network expansion projects across west, central, and eastern Monongalia County to connect unserved or underserved residents and businesses to our Xfinity and Comcast business services, " he said. "We value the continued partnership with Monongalia County as we look to deliver our fast, reliable Internet and innovative technology through these network expansions."
These projects are the culmination of a four-year process that started when the commission hired Ohio-based Ice Miller to put together a comprehensive countywide broadband plan in May 2021. The plan would ultimately cost the county about $500, 000.
While the commission initially anticipated using the finished document to secure federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant dollars directly, the free-for-all nature with which money started being distributed caused it to shift gears.
"We saw the writing on the wall, that a lot of these grants were going directly to ISPs. Well, we're an anomaly out there in that we have a plan and a strategy for executing that plan where nobody else really had that, " Sikora said. "So, when there was a move to rely on the ISPs to do all that legwork that we had already done, it kind of took the legs out from underneath us, so we had to pivot and move towards bringing the ISPs to us as partners."
Frustrations are already mounting over the speed at which those BEAD dollars are coming out of Washington — but that's just the beginning. When and if those dollars reach their final recipients, that starts a five-year clock to build out the promised project.
Meanwhile, work is underway in Monongalia County.
"You still have grants that were awarded under RDOF (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) where there's been no progress. What was that, five years ago ? So, it's kind of a mess. If you want to make something real confusing, get the government involved — and I say that as a county commissioner, " Sikora laughed. "We operate a little differently than other government entities."