ANTIGO — Several more townships in Langlade County are close to having high speed internet access, according to Niel Schueller, a member of the Langlade County Broadband Commission. Schueller updated officials on the topic at a town unit meeting Thursday night.
“Polar, Norwood and Rolling should be done this month,” Schueller said. “They started last year in terms of the construction work and things like that. Peck, Vilas, and Summit will start probably within the next few weeks or so, and they’ll start burying the fiber. That will take probably a good part of the summer, but then they’ve got to start connections and all of that stuff. So the plan right now is to have those three townships — Peck, Vilas and Summit — done by the end of the fall.”
The commission has been overseeing the installation of broadband infrastructure including fiber optic cable and broadcasting towers throughout the past few years.
“Basically, the charter of the broadband commission is to completely populate the county with people that have broadband access,” Schueller said. “Now, not everybody’s going to use it, but everybody should be able to get it if they want to. Right now, that’s not the case. There’s big portions of the county that are not served by any kind of broadband service. And so there was a lot of funding that came out right around the time of the pandemic and afterwards, and a lot of that money was supposed to help fill in the gaps, because they found that when kids were going to school remotely and we were working remotely, it just didn’t work for a lot of people.”
Angie Close, another member of the commission and the executive director of the Langlade County Economic Development Corporation, said from 2016 to 2022, broadband projects were completed through $2.54 million in grants from the Wisconsin Public Service Commision, as well as matching funds that municipalities, counties, businesses, and internet service providers themselves contributed.
Close said the broadband expansion effort is a major priority of the Economic Development Corporation.
“Broadband and childcare are our two main community development efforts,” Close said. “That is definitely a priority and it has been our mission to make sure we expand broadband infrastructure, which includes fiber optic cable and tower broadcasting, so that we can maximize the coverage and provide opportunities throughout Langlade County. Those opportunities are everything — they help us retain people here and attract people here as well, because broadband, it’s the lifeline of today’s needs and culture that we live in.”
Schueller said that as part of the overall project, Cirrinity, the main internet service provider that has handled installations, will physically move a 300 foot broadcasting tower from Elderon to Langlade County which will synchronize all communication between local emergency service entities.
“First and foremost, the purpose of that tower is to improve 911 service,” Schueller said. “It basically allows the sheriff’s office, police department, fire department, all of them to broadcast over a synchronized 911 system, whereas right now, they have to switch between radio frequencies to communicate between different groups. Some of the county already has that synchronized service available. The northwest part of the county does not — there’s no signal out there. So this is going to solve a major problem with the emergency services group.”
Schueller said at the moment, emergency responders can not always communicate with handheld devices when outside of their vehicles.
“If they come on an accident scene, grab their radio, go out, and they’re trying to give service to somebody that might be injured or whatever, they can’t even call in using their handheld,” he said. “They have to go back to the car that has a more powerful transmitter. So that alone is going to be worth the time and expense of getting that set up.”
Schueller explained that how broadband access will be provided to different areas in the county may depend on their landscapes.
“Langlade County generally is not too bad because it’s not hilly. But you get into some portions of the county and hills around some of the lakes, you might have good coverage up on the hilltops, but you can’t get it projected down into the valleys and stuff like that,” he said. “So then you start looking for other ways to get it there. That might be fiber in the ground, but more than likely, it’s just going to be a series of repeater stations or something like that. I don’t know how much is going to be fiber and tower coverage, but I think we’ll end up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 or 30 percent of the county that is going to have to be by some non-fiber method, fixed wireless or something like that.”
Schueller said internet service providers burying fiber will likely contact property owners and offer to extend it to their houses for a less expensive introductory rate that it would behoove them to agree to.
“If you do it when they’re out in the area doing all these connections, they usually give you a much better rate. I’ve heard numbers anywhere from $100 to $150 to $200, whereas if you come in later and want to hook up, then it’s usually x number of dollars per foot to the house, much like it is for electric or anything else, so they’ll give you a price break to hook it up,” he said. “So even if you decide you’re not going to keep the service, you’re better off putting it in in the beginning, because that’s when you’re going to get the best deal on installation.”
Schueller seconded Close’s comment about the importance of broadband to a community’s health in the modern world.
“When you look at what really drives people to move into an area, one of the key things that they’re looking for is good internet service,” Schueller said. “Because people are working more and more from a remote location, and if you don’t have good internet, then that kind of crosses that location off of the map for you. You can’t move to that area. So it will mean a lot in terms of being able to service those people that are working from home. It will give businesses a better infrastructure for their accounting systems and all of that stuff because they’ll be able to communicate through the internet.”
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