Windstream's Kinetic fiber brand will invest around $7.2 million to connect some 3,400 homes, businesses and schools in Georgia’s Chattooga County with high-speed fiber internet as part of the company’s mission to expand gigabit fiber service across its 18-state footprint.
The investment is part of a public-private partnership deal with Chattooga County, which will contribute just over $3 million in state grant money from the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program, part of the federal American Rescue Plan Act. All told, the project will cost $10.3 million.
With that sum Kinetic plans to lay down 320 miles of optical fiber cable to connect eligible homes and business in the county, including areas in Summerville, Trion, Lyerly and Menlo. The company has committed to covering any cost overruns, with work expected to be completed next year.
Rex Reeves, VP of Kinetic Operations Intelligence, said Kinetic expects to meet that deadline, as the company is overcoming an industry-wide labor shortage through a combination of partnerships with external contractors and its internal construction team.
Kinetic’s fiber-optic broadband provides symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 1 Gbps. According to speed tests from Ookla, the median download speed in Georgia is about 178 Mbps and the median upload speed is about 24 Mbps.
The company's Chattooga County fiber project is part of a $2 billion, multi-year capital investment strategy to expand gigabit fiber service across Windstream's 18-state footprint. It secured significant Georgia grants in previous funding rounds, including $34.9 million this year and plans to build 95,000 new fiber locations in the state before 2024. That doesn’t include the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) awards Kinetic won in all 18 of the states it covers, which came out to $520 million in funding to build out to 190,000 locations.
Reeves said the company has entered “a number of" private-public partnership deals similar to the one in Chattooga County over the last couple of years – some of them to serve many thousands of locations and some are just a few hundred in rural areas. Collectively, those deals will cover approximately 135,000 houses.
Kinetic expects to receive about $340 million in funding specifically for private-public partnerships across 14 states, but the company doesn’t have that money in pocket yet. Instead, funding will be doled out “over a period of time,” Reeves told Fierce, as construction hasn't started for some of the more recently awarded deals.
Most of that money will come from the federal American Rescue Plan Act and some from the state Universal Service Fund. The company has committed to match over $140 million in construction costs for private-public partnerships across the country.
Those deals are going to represent a greater proportion of Kinetic’s capital, Reeves said, because they “much more expensive rural locations” compared to the company’s other strategic build outs in dense coverage areas. Notably, the 135,000 locations served by Kinetic’s private-public partnerships will be built with a substantial 11,000 route miles of fiber.
“Which is why these programs exist,” Reeves said, “to make the economic case possible for us to reach these locations. So, it's proof that these that these programs are working and we're getting fiber farther and farther into rural America.”