Also, it was a win win in a sense. Citizens got amazing internet and the public safety folks got safer. Before, the radio system only cover certain areas of the County and handheld radios were useless. Kinda scary for public safety folks. Now the County has full coverage with no dead spots and super reliability. That did add into the cost a bit. The County also put hotspots on major buildings in population centers as well. Like I said, they did good

That I’m not sure TBH. Second part is easy. They put out RFP’s and went at it. Lotta local guys got the contracts too which is nice so the revenue goes stays local. I lucked out as my company had the contracts with those local companies to maintain their equipment so when stuff broke, the entire County was breathing down our necks lol. I actually sent out a truck just dedicated to those companies and their fleets. It would literally follow the trenchers from site to site and be ready to fix it if it broke and we even did the maintenance in the off hours so the machines weren’t down for that. That’s a unique service our company offers. But I digress. The system would be finished if not for supply chain issues and getting nodes. I know a lot of it was funded via bonds but they got a good chunk of COVID cash for it. When the deployment first started it was tough but once the companies got synched up holy shit the speed of install was nuts. I got the fiber pulled, handholds and nodes installed, the pull to my house and the NID installed in under two weeks. The key is to not half ass it. The County spent a good amount of time engineering the system the right way. While everyone was screaming hurry up, they took the design and engineering time to make sure it was future proof and reliable. They really did a fantastic job and it was worth the effort. They do all the installs and customer service too and because it’s a County entity, they can’t fuck around without finding out from the people.

Yeah, folks in Cville are not happy and the folks in the next County over are livid. Their county government is writing building permits with wanton abandonment because of “muh tax revenue”. Folks are now saying where’s this tax revenue and why does the next county over have fiber and in under two years.

We had this issue where I live. Well, sort of. We had no internet sans Hughes Net which is run by asshole liars and cheats, or DSL. I live pretty rural and this has always been an issue for us that and DSL is slower than dial up because I’m so far from the CO. Welp, about 2019, the County Government got fed up with trying to get Verizon or Firefly to build a network for us. Neither wanted to because the upfront capital and the time to recoup it. Well fuck you too. Shit part is the fiber trunk runs up the main highway righ along side the county line to a major data center then to Ashburn.

Then COVID. County applied for numerous grants and got nothing while ducking Comcast’s got millions to deploy at network and then keep the cash. County said fuck this shit.

It’s now the end of 2022 and the County not only designed, engineered and deployed the network but it’s almost complete. The entire fucking County. They even did the schools and public safety radio system. It’s all fiber now. They installed the fiber, nodes, relays and all the interconnects for millions less than Verizon or Firefly. Because the County owns it we make out like crooks. I pay $80 a month for 1G/500 all fiber. I had to pay for the pull to my home which was $400 but I divided up by 24 months and slapped it on my bill. As it’s a County service, I pay no taxes and no fees. A flat $99.99 until next August then it’s $79.99. No data caps and no throttling ever. Last month I pulled over 2 TB down with zero issues.

Fuck big monopolies. Let the County level government do this shit and see what happens. I’m free market all the way but sometimes the free market isn’t even remotely the best option

Also, fuck Verizon