When John and Kirstie Tiernan moved to Brown County from Chicago four years ago, they didn’t know how hard it would be to get high-speed internet at home, just 3 miles from downtown Nashville.
Internet providers who would return John Tiernan’s calls quoted prices “well into the six figures.” Frustration led him to the local Broadband Task Force, which had been trying to solve such problems for all of Brown County.
Three weeks ago, the Tiernans’ neighborhood finally went live, and the speed is five times faster than what they had in downtown Chicago, John said.
“My 4-year-old and my 2-year-old, I’m confident they will have every educational opportunity that every kid in this country has. My wife and I can be more competitive in our careers,” he told a crowd packed into the Village Green Pavilion, out of the rain.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]“We’ve always referred to Brown County as our ‘forever place,’ and now it can be.”
Local company Mainstream Fiber, led by Brown County native Brian Gabriel, made it happen, with the help of many people working in government and supporting it, said State Sen. Eric Koch (R-Bedford).
High-speed internet is vital to meeting education, economic development, and health and safety needs in the community, task force chairman Mike Laros said.
Nashville was the first town and Brown County was the first county in the state to receive a Broadband Ready designation, based on legislation Koch authored.
“It ain’t easy to get broadband in rural America,” Laros said.
The Broadband Ready designation is meant to show internet providers that a community is ready to work with them, and here, it spurred various leaders to work together to make things happen, Laros said.
The Oct. 27 gathering was a celebration of Brown County’s first rural broadband project, a 7-mile stretch of Morrison, Helmsburg, Lanam Ridge and Grandma Barnes roads not currently served by DSL or cable internet.
With that project, about 100 homes were reached, Gabriel said.
Starting in the next month or so, another expansion project will start on State Road 135 North from Bean Blossom to the Brown-Morgan county line, Gabriel said.
Between those two projects, Mainstream Fiber will have made almost $950,000 of investment in Brown County in six months, serving more than 400 homes, he said.
And that’s just the beginning.
Smithville Fiber also announced the same week that it’s expanding its high-speed fiber network to serve businesses and government offices in downtown Nashville. The company has invested nearly $250,000 in the latest upgrade to gigabit-level internet.
“This designation should send a clear message to businesses and companies considering Nashville as a possible expansion site,” said Cullen McCarty, president of Smithville Telecom. “Smithville stands ready to have more businesses join our growing family of enterprise customers in Nashville.”
Indiana Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch saluted the people involved in these rural broadband projects, calling rural Indiana “the next great economic frontier.”
“Abraham Lincoln said that ‘the fact some can achieve great success is proof to me that others can achieve it also,’” she said.
“You have taken it upon yourself and upon your community to come together and collaborate in order to accomplish a goal and to provide needed services to your residents. And I cannot think of any greater success than that.”
