After working over a year to obtain licenses to deploy fiber across town, by this time next week the central Connecticut town of Plainville, home to approximately 17,500 residents, will begin construction of a municipal fiber network. When finished, the network will connect all town offices, public education facilities, public safety services, and wastewater treatment facilities.
Over a decade after high-speed fiber connections linking the town’s municipal center and a local high school to the statewide Nutmeg Network were first established in Plainville, multiple municipal buildings throughout town still lacked reliable broadband connections, and some had not been connected to the Internet at all.
With locally-based construction firm Sertex set to begin laying fiber for the townwide institutional network (I-Net) next week, which will include “12.5 miles of aerial cabling and three underground spans running beneath major highways,” that’s all about to change for the relatively dense, 10-square-mile community, reports Sertex.
Using money the town was able to save through its five-year Capital Improvement Plan [pdf], Plainville will pay Sertex about $750,000 to build the fiber network. Plainville will own the fiber infrastructure, eradicating recurring charges the town paid to both Comcast and Frontier to lease telephone, cable and fiber connections. The cost savings the town will enjoy because of the fiber network are expected to be in the range of $40,000 per year. “We saw [the network] as something that would pay for itself over time,” Plainville’s Town Manager Robert Lee told ILSR, in an interview.
Fiber Brings Efficiency and Resiliency to Town
The I-Net will better coordinate and introduce new capabilities to Plainville’s town operations and improve the overall efficiency and resiliency of internal communications – benefits that are hard to measure the value of in dollars and cents. The fiber network will allow...
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