Speakers at a conference conducted on Tuesday night at Great Rivers Distributing in Pomona discussed the past of the Heritage Business Park, where Great Rivers and many other companies are housed, as well as the prospects for high-speed internet in the region.
Owner of Current Inc. Danny Thomas discussed the second of those subjects and introduced employee Alan Stocki as the team’s subject matter expert for its online services.
The company was once a provider of heating and cooling systems, but it has subsequently expanded to include fibre optic internet installation. When Stocki inquired about installing equipment on five towers approximately six years ago, a reputable service provider in California informed her that it was a lofty objective. He proceeded by saying that since then, 262 towers across five counties have had equipment installed by Current Inc.
Stocki said that during the coronavirus shutdown in spring 2020, he painfully realised that his family’s requirement for an improvement in internet speed and availability wasn’t being satisfied because children were home from school and sharing the bandwidth.
He added that it was a major issue for businesses like Air Evac whose staff members were finding it challenging to work from home due to sluggish internet speeds.
By doing their research and taking a risk, he and Thomas set out on a mission to find a solution to that problem. In certain cases, they collaborated with Howell Oregon Electric Cooperative to put fibre optic cable on cooperative poles in order to serve rural clients.
With its internet service, Current Inc. started providing public utilities roughly two years ago, according to Stocki.
According to Stocki, a customer might pay to have their own wireless internet tower installed and then receive a discount on their internet service bill by sharing the service with neighbours who are within the tower’s broadcast range. In some cases, this would give access to an extra five to ten users.
That was OK, he added, but fibre optic, with a transmission speed of 1,000 megabytes per second, is superior.
In March, the company was given approximately $9.46 million to help bring high speed internet to more than 1,600 single family homes, 80 businesses, and 33 anchor institutions in Oregon County. Anchor institutions are defined as public entities such as schools, hospitals, and government offices. The company participated in a competitive bidding process to receive federal funds for internet expansion.
The goal of the expansion, according to Stocki, is to specifically reach the underserved in small towns and rural areas like the Ozarks, who are frequently ignored because it is less cost-effective for many companies to build the infrastructure to provide service to a population where there may only be a few customers per mile than in a more densely populated city.
“At a cost of about $14,000 per mile, you’re never going to see a payback,” said Stocki. It was crucial for the government to step in and make this possible for the inhabitants since “no company in their right mind is going to come in and lay out that infrastructure.”
He stated that the company’s policy of being good neighbours and assisting in the solutions to the problems caused by a lack of high speed internet connection included investing the money made back into the community.
He stated that Current Inc. has installed fibre optic cable on “thousands” of HOEC poles with a 10 year plan to keep extending its fibre optic internet accessibility into inaccessible regions of Ozark County.