Michael and Amy Spalding bought property and built their home in Brown County in an area without cellphone or internet service in hopes that they could quickly hook onto fiber internet provided by South Central Indiana REMC.

“The cell service, we were aware of, but we had lived in Monroe County for five years with no cell service, so we were used to that. We were really hoping that our REMC would get to us faster,” he said.

But his family is still without any real connection to the internet or cell service, and that has made life more challenging, especially during a pandemic.

“It has been really difficult and with the COVID shutdown, both my employer and my wife Amy’s employers had some options for telework, but those options were not available to us,” he said.

They do have a landline phone, though.

The Spaldings had bought their land as an investment or future building site, then decided to go ahead and build their home due to increasing construction costs and low interest rates.

Right now, they don’t even have enough cell service to send text messages.

“As far as internet, we cannot even get satellite internet because of forest cover and topography,” he said.

“We were able to get satellite internet in Monroe County. It’s not great, but it definitely served the needs.”

The couple was also excited to move to the county to send their children to Helmsburg Elementary School. They’re going to school in person, which they’re grateful for since remote learning would be impossible from their home.

Spalding works for the Department of Natural Resources, and sometimes he has better service when he’s working in Brown County forests than at his home.

“It’s really difficult. One of the biggest challenges is that all of our friends and family, it’s like no one can understand we don’t have cell service. It’s, ‘Hey I can’t get ahold of you,’ and we’re like, ‘We explained, no cell service.’”

Spalding is also a member of the Brown County Redevelopment Commission. When free public Wi-Fi was available at the schools, Spalding would park in the Helmsburg Elementary parking lot to attend virtual RDC meetings on Zoom from his car.

Lack of internet connection was the No. 2 reason Spalding wanted to serve on the RDC. No. 1 was land conservation. “I really want to be there to help steer development in a positive direction, but also making sure that land conservation remains the priority,” he said.

“The second reason was … we are a young family that moved to Brown County because we want to be a part of this community. However, since we moved here, it’s quite obvious that people won’t want to move places where they don’t have no cell phone service or high speed internet. If Brown County wants to survive, that needs to happen.”

REMC update

The Spaldings’ property is on a road that’s split between two phases of SCI REMC’s project. One of the phases is near completion and the other is already in service.

SCI REMC is running gigabit internet to about 24,000 homes in Brown and six other nearby counties.

Mike Laros, of Brown County’s Broadband Task Force, said last month that SCI REMC is in phase two of its five-year project.

In September, SCI REMC received more $1.8 million in matching grant funds from the second round of the state’s Next Level Broadband grant program. SCI REMC will be required to provide a match of more than $1.8 million for a total project cost of more than $3.7 million.

The recent grant will help lower project costs for all members, and “will help us provide broadband to our service territory and surrounding communities sooner,” said Tammy Haenlein, SCI REMC manager of member services.

About 700 SCI REMC power customers in Brown County have internet through the company currently. Most of them are surrounding Nashville, with construction continuing to the north and northeast of town.

Members in and around the Nashville area who live south of Bean Blossom and east of the Lake Lemon area currently have access.

Most of the company’s internet construction is happening in Brown County, Haenlein said. “Construction has ramped up in Brown County so that additional areas will have broadband available in the coming weeks,” she said.

“Drops to the home are being installed to members in many parts of Morgantown, and construction of the fiber infrastructure is nearing completion with drops to members starting soon in parts of Trafalgar and Nineveh,” she said.

“Construction around Cordry and Sweetwater lakes is ongoing, with drops expected to begin in December.”

Already, the company has more than 3,500 fiber internet subscribers throughout its service territory.

“We expect to have approximately 7,500 active fiber subscribers by the end of next year, with nearly all of our membership having access to high-speed internet by mid-2022,” Haenlein said.

Residents and businesses can still sign up for service by registering at www.sciremc.com/fiber. Specific zone construction updates are available there.

“If your zone is already active, we will try to provide broadband service within a few weeks after registration. If your zone is not yet in service, we encourage you to sign up now before crews leave the area,” Haenlein said.

“This helps keep the project costs down and the progress moving most efficiently.”

Other projects

Three providers have been working on bringing fiber internet to homes in Brown County: SCI REMC, Jackson County REMC and Mainstream.

In 2016, Brown County joined Nashville as a certified broadband-ready community in hopes of sending a strong message about the community’s commitment to expanding internet access.

In 2017, Mainstream announced it would be expanding its service to bring high-speed internet to an additional 150 households. All of Morrison Road and parts of Grandma Barnes Road, Helmsburg Road, Lanam Ridge Road and Owl Creek Road were included in the expansion.

In the last six months of 2017, Mainstream invested almost $950,000 in expanding internet connections in Brown County.

In March 2018, the Brown County Commissioners and Brown County Council passed a measure that gave business personal property tax exemptions to companies that build internet infrastructure here.

Not long after, both SCI REMC and Jackson County REMC announced plans to bring high-speed fiber internet to their power customers’ homes in Brown County.

Laros was the chairman of the Broadband Task Force, which was tasked with trying to solve internet connectivity problems for all of Brown County.

He said Mainstream taking that first “dip” into expanding service made way for both REMCs to do the same.

“It was them showing the willingness to come in and take a risk and essentially saying … ‘It’s not, “If we build it, they’ll come,” but we can make it profitable. Our costs aren’t as high as the big providers that refuse to come in.’”

Mainstream was concentrating mainly on bringing fiber internet to homes that had power from Duke Energy — homes that REMC wasn’t working to serve with internet.

A Mainstream representative was not available by deadline to answer questions about the company’s current service area.

“They have some places where they are directly one-on-one with them (REMC), like on Lanam Ridge and elsewhere, because REMC’s trunk line had to go through there, so they did drops anyway,” Laros said.

“They were trying to not have to duplicate as much as possible at the beginning, but there were some areas where it was natural for both of them to start the way they did.”

Jackson County REMC provides power to 1,200 customers in Brown County, most in Van Buren Township and three in Washington Township. Extending fiber internet to them was estimated to cost about $3.5 million.

That project was fully funded around this time last year.

“They are picking up an area that would have never been picked up. You’re talking down near Story and past that in areas there was just no way we were going to get any viable solution,” Laros said.

Late last month, Jackson County REMC Marketing and Communications Specialist Nicole Ault said that all power customers in Brown County now have access to fiber-optic high-speed internet. The service territory map is shown at fiber.jacksonremc.com.

“We have most of the hook-ups in Brown County completed, but we do have some currently in the process of being completed,” she said.

“We estimate having all our members in all of our counties hooked up by the middle of 2022, barring any unforeseen circumstances.”

Anyone living in the service territory can sign up for internet through Jackson County REMC, but if their zone is closed, they would be charged a $500 installation fee unless they wish to be put on a short wait list, Ault said. If a certain number of members in a closed zone want access to internet, Jackson County REMC will waive that installation fee.

Connecting students

As the pandemic hit home and all students were put on eLearning for the rest of last school year in March, it became more evident that accessibility to internet was a problem for families in Brown County.

Mainstream worked with Brown County Schools to install high-speed internet signals that reached to school parking lots and was available to the public, creating 11 new free public Wi-Fi access points across the county — including the one Spalding used to attend RDC meetings from the Helmsburg Elementary parking lot.

For homes that don’t yet have service, but have students needing it, Brown County Schools was able to secure 65 Verizon Wireless hotspots for this school year using funding from the federal government’s CARES Act.

Those hotspots were almost all distributed by the beginning of September, Hammack said.

Other families can get fiber internet installed from Mainstream, after the district wrote that into its CARES grant, Hammack said. Last month, Bryan Gabriel, founder and CEO of Mainstream, and the school district Director of Technology David Phelps were working out the details for the connection arrangement.

Laying groundwork

According to a 2020 FCC Broadband Deployment Report, 58 percent of Brown County was covered by broadband internet.

“It’s really amazing how it all came together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had broadband for at least five to 10 more years,” Laros said.

He said that the task force had approached large wireless and wired internet providers about investing in Brown County. “None of them that we talked to thought that it was worthwhile coming into our county because it’s so difficult to construct and there is so few people,” he said.

“We had everybody under the sun basically just saying, ‘Thank you for asking, but we’re not about to make this.’”

Laros continues to keep in touch with the three main providers to get updates on their progress, but the task force has not been active in a year.

He credited former Nashville Town Manager Scott Rudd with breaking down “the barriers at the county,” which allowed for Mainstream to expand its service here and ultimately resulted in the two REMCs following.

“All of those things just came together. It was luck, but it was also fortune,” Laros said.

“Without any one of the links, I don’t think we’d be where we’re at. I can tell you, had we not had that first Mainstream project, none of that would have happened at all.”

Rudd now works as Indiana’s first director of broadband opportunities.

He said getting internet to all residents is more important than ever before because of the pandemic.

“There are people who are unserved and those folks are feeling some intense pressures right now. It’s more important than ever to allow residents to access things like telemedicine, education, working from home and basic quality of life to help us recover as quickly as possible from the pandemic,” he said.

In his job with the state, Rudd works to bridge the gap “between the haves and the have-nots,” “to help communities like Brown, and even urban areas across the state, that are experiencing a variety of needs. Some of those needs are not access, some of those needs, as you know, in Brown County are more about affordability,” he said.

That’s where the Next Level Connections grant program helps.

Rudd said there is also funding from the Federal Communications Commission Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, and this month, an “auction” will occur for $16 billion portion of that fund. Across Indiana, 162,000 locations are eligible for the funding, including many in Brown County, like 519 locations in the Helmsburg area alone. But internet providers must apply to get funding through that program.

Other options

Verizon Wireless is currently awaiting approval from the Brown County Board of Zoning Appeals to place a new tower on property on Lick Creek Road, not far from the Spaldings’ property, which would help provide cell phone service to their home and many others in the area.

“I actually got several neighbors to join in writing letters expressing their own personal reasons why they wanted to see that tower come to Lick Creek Road,” he said.

He said he’s grateful that SCI REMC is working to bring internet to his home. His disappointment is when the community opposes an investment that could help with that, like a cell phone tower.

Over the summer, neighbors expressed opposition to the tower, causing the BZA to delay voting on it. It hasn’t reappeared on an upcoming meeting docket yet.

“There are wonderful things going on,” Spalding said. “We just need to make sure the entire community supports them when they are.”