By Charles Vivier
MBC buried fiber cable>>POP.1+grant>>RSN fiber>>BMT>>RSNTs>>customer
Mid-Atlantic Broadband (MBC) is a utility company that has a buried fiber optics cable going from Martinsville to Stuart. It is like a limited access super-highway with very few on-off interchanges. The high-volume interchange stations are called Point-of-Presence (POP) stations. In Patrick County, POP.1 is at the County Office Building, POP.2 is at the Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) and POP.3 is at the County Industrial Park. A POP.4 could be spliced-in and constructed along the MBC highway. It would be expensive, but it is an option.
Patrick County has been awarded a grant to build a $1.4 million fixed wireless system that would transmit aerial signals from towers to and from unserved and underserved customers. The system will be constructed, owned and serviced by RiverStreetNetworks (RSN), a private utility located in Wilkesboro, N.C., just over an hour from Patrick County. They are funding the project in addition to the grant.
Present grant engineering plans are to have a main central tower on Bull Mountain that would transmit wireless aerial signals to and from other RSN towers (RSNTs) to serve customers. The main RSN tower is to be served by an RSN fiber backbone cable that will be buried along a road and then attached to existing utility poles to a Bull Mountain Tower (BMT). Cellular towers work the same way, with fiber optic cables bringing voice and internet signals to the base of the towers before being transmitted from the tower top to people’s mobile phones.
The RSN fiber optics cable will originate from a POP station. RSN will pay recurring fees to MBC for high load broadband that will be parceled out to low load wireless customers who will also pay a fee for broadband “lite.”
The cost analysis determination of which POP station to use is still underway.
(Vivier is a member of the Patrick County Broadband Committee.)
