Grafton County moves toward universal broadband coverage with $3.8 million in ARPA funds

Grafton County is aiming to reach universal broadband coverage, and last week the county’s executive committee approved $3.8 million in spending toward closing the gap.

The money – which comes from federal dollars through the American Rescue Plan Act – will fund what’s called final engineering for broadband plans in all 39 towns. Final engineering involves a detailed on-the-ground study to get a project ready for construction: engineers drive the roads where wires will be strung, identify the specific poles that will be used, apply for permits where needed, and draft a final design complete with the total building cost. And the town administrator who has been leading the effort hopes it will clear the way for additional federal funding.

“When this work is done in November, the entire county could be built (starting) Nov. 2 because we’ll know exactly where it’s going to go, how much it’s going to cost, whose permission we need. Everything is just ready to go,” said Bristol Town Administrator Nik Coates, who has been pushing regional broadband efforts through the Grafton County Broadband Committee. The building process itself will take years to complete.

Coates hopes finalizing these engineering plans will make it easier to secure other grant funding to cover construction costs. The county’s recent application for $26.2 million from the National Transportation Infrastructure Agency – which was challenged by incumbent providers – failed, and Coates thinks that’s partially because they hadn’t finished planning the projects yet.

Coates said the county broadband committee plans to meet with each of the county’s towns to advise them on applying for grants – support that towns that are short-staffed aren’t getting elsewhere and can’t do themselves because broadband is technically complicated and the research needed for grants is time-consuming.  

But not all towns are interested, like those that are mostly covered or have used other funding to fill in the gaps. In those instances, Coates said they’ll make a case to those towns to think beyond their borders and see this work as a part of a broader network that could eventually link to Maine and Vermont.

Those connections will reinforce the network, making it stronger in the case of outages. “If one portion goes down, you’ve got a backup plan,” Coates said.