Representatives from Charter Spectrum, RiverStreet Networks, and Appalachian Power (AEP) provided a broadband update at the Monday, October 21 Patrick County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Charter Spectrum Director of Network Engineering and Construction Zach Church said the company has two commitments for work in the county: the first is the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) through the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) World Digital Opportunity Fund. The second is through the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative (VATI), the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD).
“VATI locations, preliminary we thought were 690, I will say we’re finding a couple hundred more locations out there as we build, which is good news. We’re reaching more folks, it creates new density, that’s good news,” Church said.
For the RDOF locations, Church estimated there are 873 locations, but noted new locations are also being identified as construction begins.
“A little over 1,500 total, but a few hundred more than that after it’s all said and done,” he said, adding the permitting, walkout, and designs are done behind the scenes.
“You don’t see our trucks, you don’t see us in the field, it’s all kind of below the surface of the water. Not until we get to the actual construction and activation phases” will they be visible, he said.
When he last visited the county in April, Church said site visits with the state had been completed and construction had started. “So, we are well above the surface of the water, and we’ve made really good progress since April,” he added.
For the VATI and RDOF locations, Church said the walkout and design phases had been completed, but permitting continues to be a process.
“With VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation), we’ve got 60 submitted with them, we’ve got 40 back, so we’re working on those pending ones,” he said, adding the company is working on 60 submitted to AEP.
The company also ended up having to perform a lot more make-readies than originally anticipated mainly because of the age of the poles, some of which he noted hadn’t been touched since the 1950s, Church said.
“As we’re getting out there, we’re realizing that’s there’s a lot more work to be done on some of these than we originally anticipated. It’s not impacting our timelines. AEP has been good partners with us, so we’re working through those,” he said.
Church said 100 percent of the needed permits have been submitted to national parks. The make-ready and construction are still in process, and activation started last quarter. “As of this month, we’ve activated 551 of those locations across the county, 433 of them are our commitments to the state through the VATI, and then 118 of those are locations in those RDOF areas,” he said.
For the VATI builds, Church said the contract with DHCD requires a May 2025 completion date. “We are on track for that. We may even finish a little bit early, but we are on track for that due date,” he said.
For RDOF builds, Church said the company is still tracking a mid-to-late 2025 completion date, which is a few years earlier than its FCC requirement.
AEP External Affairs Manager Amanda Cox said the company’s role is to be the middle mile partner.
“We’re coming in and building fiber in areas of our service territory with rough terrain, some cases sparse populations, the harder to reach areas, the mountainous areas of our service territory,” she said.
FCC approval was required, Cox said, which caused a small delay in the project. She added that AEP plans to invest $22.4 million in the project for Patrick County alone.
“Basically, we build in the power zone, we own and operate the asset. This voids some of the traditional make-ready Charter was talking about. A lot of that stuff that happens on the permitting side we won’t have to do because it will be our asset,” she said.
AEP will lease the fiber and hand it off to RiverStreet, which will serve residents and customers. While this is occurring, Cox said AEP plans to enhance the electric grid by upgrading the equipment as it builds.
Like Charter, Cox said AEP has experienced some delays, “but we are working through all of them to make sure that we don’t have any mistakes. We want to build this one time, and we want it to serve all your residents if they want to be part of this,” she said.
Cox said the 30-mile Stella route is one of the first parts AEP’s working on. “I believe we have two miles at this point of Stella build out of the 30-mile build. Keep in mind we had to pull every single crew that we had to send them to relief efforts and restoration efforts for Hurricane Helene. So, you could be several more miles but that’s what we had to do,” she said.
Construction for the 24-mile Stuart-Floyd segment is expected to start in December, and the 30-mile Stuart Willis Gap is targeted to start early February 2025. “We believe that we’re actually going to come in ahead of the new deadline that we’ve been given,” she said.
Cox said the 2025 construction segments include a 13.9-mile Dobyns section scheduled to begin in April 2025. The 14.10-mile Elamsville segment, 17.60-mile Pole Bridge segment, and 13.50-mile Meadows of Dan segment are all slated to begin in July 2025.
“We have added additional resources, additional crews, we’ve upped our crews to 10 that are working on these projects, and we could even see more in the future, we’re always working on that with our company to add more resources and crews to assist,” she said.
RiverStreet Director of Business Development and Government Affairs Rob Taylor said the company has just over 8,376 funded locations, and additional locations were found, with about 8,800 locations in Patrick County.
“There’s a total of 621 miles, a lot of that is being installed by AEP, but a lot of that’s being installed by us as well. At some locations AEP will bring it straight to the pole just from by the house, and in some locations, they’ll bring it to maybe the neighborhood and then we’ll run fiber from there into the neighborhoods,” he said.
Taylor said the project cost is just shy of $50 million, with RiverStreet bringing in $104 million and $1.5 million in RDOF funding. AEP is set to bring in $14 million in their leg work, and the additional $7 million in work in building the power zones.
“The county’s brought in $2.1 million, and that’s between both VATI 2022 and 2023. So, the total VATI amount awarded for the county was just over $21 million,” he said.
Taylor said one of the main issues his company has encountered is finding locations for remote buildings to house electronics, which are typically 12×20 concrete cast buildings that are put on a small 50×50 lot.
“There are a few locations we’d like to locate those in; high density areas where we could make it easier to feed out. So far, we’ve been running into issues getting lease agreements with property owners, and so we’ve engaged with the county as well as with the Timmons Group to help us find those locations,” he said.
Taylor said the plan is as AEP builds the fiber out, it will be turned over to RiverStreet which would then splice it and start hooking up customers. There is another round of funding coming down called Broadband Equity, Access and Development (BEAD), Taylor said.
For VATI 2023, he said the definition of broadband changed from 25 megs of service down or three megs of service up to 100 megs down and 20 megs up.
“So, anybody that was in that gap…they now became designated as underserved, and they were fundable. During that period of time, they also started to change the maps. The maps were based off of geometric block groups and they instead went to actual addresses, so they can use the Virginia Address System, they use the Federal Addressing System, and they started going out and identifying actual locations on the ground that were building that should have broadband services, not just an area in the county they thought they had this many addresses in,” he said.
In doing that, Taylor said the BEAD program was created, and Virginia received a little more than $1.48 billion, with an estimated $900 million set to be spent to connect the last bit of customers in the most rural areas of the state.
“Looking at the map, right now we’ve identified, with the estimate the state has given… there appears to be approximately 1,568 locations in Patrick County that fall into that BEAD fundable locations,” he said.
Of that, Taylor said his company feels there are about 1,300 in the area it’s building in, 20 that fall in the area RiverStreet and Charter share, and 240 in Charter’s territory.
Taylor also discussed RiverStreet’s marketing efforts for its broadband services.
