Project bringing high-speed Internet service

A stimulus project begun in 2010 will soon bring high speed Internet service to the rural areas of Tulare County, including much of the Orange Belt.

Motorists have probably noticed the work going on in many areas during the past few months. On Friday, one of the 12 crews working in Tulare County was installing the conduit along North Main Street that will carry the fiber optic cable into the region.

Eric Coyne, with Tulare County, said the project is approximately 50 percent complete in the county where 200 miles of cable is being installed. Tulare County is getting the most cable of any of the 18 counties benefitting from the stimulus project in California.

In all, 11,381 businesses, 110,385 households, 250 K-12 schools; two junior colleges, 72 public safety facilities and 22 public libraries will be connected in the county.

“As of today, Mike Stewart, director of marketing for the project, reports he expects all major construction in the rural areas of Tulare County to be complete by early summer, and some of the first segments of the system to be providing services by the end of summer,” said Coyne.

At least two crews are working in the Porterville area, with much of the work within city limits already completed.

City Manager John Lollis said the project, called the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Improvement Project (CVIN), is a consortium of public and private companies. It was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding in 2010 and work began last year.

The cost of implementing the project is estimated at $66.6 million, $15 million of that in Tulare County. The project covers 39,530 square miles, 24 percent of the state’s geography, and a population of 4,077,365 million, or over 11 percent of the state’s population.

Organized in 1995, CVIN LLC (Central Valley Independent Network) is a joint enterprise comprised of affiliates of several Independent Telephone Companies located in central and northern California, including Ducor Telephone Company.

The cable will be run through Lindsay, along Orange Belt Drive, into Porterville, down South Main St. to Ducor, then over to Richgrove and Delano. Cable has been run down several streets in Porterville, including Olive Avenue and Villa Street. In much of the work in town, crews used a high-pressure hose to push the conduit through rather than digging up the streets.

“They will put in fiber optics to serve Porterville Unified School District, Sierra View Hospital, the city library, city hall, police and fire stations and the new courthouse,” said Lollis. There are two hubs in town, one at the library and the second at Porterville College.

Chris Craig, director of IT at Porterville College, said the project is huge.

“It will be a significant difference,” he said. It will more than double the capacity of the college’s Internet service.

“It will benefit everybody who will come to the campus. Any benefit to Porterville College, is a benefit to the community,” he said.

Coyne praised Lollis and the City of Porterville for being proactive in the project and managing to get more conduit installed than originally planned. He said their efforts added a third more cable to the project in Porterville.

“He (Lollis) wanted to use it as a generator for economic development,” said Coyne, adding that the cable is being installed to eventually service the industrial area on the south end of town. It was also extended to serve the medical community along Villa and Putnam.

“By working with all city staffs, we tried to tweak the right to access more areas,” said Coyne. Several junction boxes are being install to where the cable can be paired off in the future.

The project also includes the installation of 12 wireless towers in the Valley, with five of those destined for Tulare County. Coyne said that will provide high speed Internet access to areas such as Alpaugh and Allensworth.