Local News
County Looking at Fast Access
By
Aug 6, 2008, 01:30

Fast access is very limited for County residents (see comments in Talk) because fast access providers do not want to serve sparsely populated areas.  Decatur County is presently considering joining the South Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority to serve county residents.

The City of Thomasville's expertise and internet services surely grew out of the lack of broadband availability to the City.  It appears to me that if these large providers do not take care of our "sparsely populated area" they will lose us forever as a customer.

SGRITA is a consortium of 5 counties whose goal is to deploy a state-of-the-art broadband network throughout Baker, Calhoun, Early, Miller and Mitchell Counties, specifically to areas that are underserved or ignored by existing broadband providers.

The fiber optic network being run into Bainbridge gives County officials another option whereby eliminating the need to run another fiber line into Bainbridge from the SGRITA network.

The perception that the SGRITA network is a typical wireless network is incorrect.  The SGRITA network, is wireless only to a point.  The County would need to build towers and run the network to them in order to provide a wireless signal.  Signal availability is limited by the towers connected to the network.

To receive service, proprietary equipment must be installed on the home and connected to the consumer’s computer or wireless router.

County Administrator Tom Patton stated he hopes to be able to receive a OneGeorgia grant to help provide fast access to county residents.

In July 2006 and November 2007, OneGeorgia awarded BRIDGE grants totaling $2,788,600 to the City of Arlington and the subsequently formed SGRITA, South Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority.

SGRITA, as of July 2008, is near completion of Phase I of their wireless broadband project covering their 5 counties.  Phase one consists of installing seventeen (17) towers or Radio Frequency (RF) equipment to build a wireless broadband backbone around the under-served 5 county area.

Nine (9) smaller towers were installed at 9 of the 12 school facilities that have joined the SGRita Wireless Broadband Community.  All network equipment has been installed and the Internet connection is in place at the SGRITA Network Operations Center (NOC) in Camilla.  This Internet connection is already circulating a significant portion of the 180 mile broadband backbone ring.  The radio frequency (RF) equipment is being installed with completion slated for August 8th.

The network will undergo 30 days of rigorous testing prior to final acceptance. All school children will be online in the under-served areas prior to September 1st. During the fourth quarter of 08, Phase II of the project will begin the beta test and research phase. In this phase, SGRITA will be investigating various equipment manufacturers for the “Fixed Wireless” phase of the project.

Once the right equipment is found, this will be installed on the 17 backbone tower locations so that SGRITA can begin to service the farms, families and businesses in the unserved and under-served areas.  SGRITA expects to be installing customers on the Fixed Wireless portion in the First Quarter of 2009 if not before.