Gloucester supervisors expressed frustration with the rollout of the Open Broadband project designed to provide underserved homes in the county with access to broadband services during the board’s Oct. 1 meeting, which was held in the colonial courthouse.

Open Broadband area supervisor Gregory Reid and Gloucester County’s director of information technology Eric Beach each made presentations to the board.

Beach gave his talk first, providing an overview on broadband outside of the Open Broadband project. Beach said that the county reached out to Cox about its progress on bringing broadband to about 37 homes off Featherbed Lane through the Rural Development Opportunity Fund program. It had been completed and it was only able to provide access to three customers who signed up in that particular area of the county.

Beach also discussed Open Broadband and its coverage of citizens through the Virginia Telecommunications Initiative (VATI) and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) through the fixed wireless program.

He said that the Main Street water tower, which is the backhaul for the fixed wireless system in that area, is up and fully configured as well as the Page water tower. People living within the area of the Page water tower are able to sign up to get access to broadband in that area.

The equipment for the Point water tower is up, but continued conversations with Verizon about putting equipment on its tower have been unsuccessful and fixed wireless cannot be provided for that particular area at this time.

The landfill tower and the tower at James Store, also known as the North Tower, are fully configured up and running. The county has suggested to Open Broadband to adjust their configuration so that they can reach citizens within the Burke View and Rangtang Road areas in order for those citizens in that area to have access.

The tower that was supposed to be located at Achilles Elementary School will no longer go there, so Open Broadband is looking for another property owned by Gloucester County to put the tower to reach citizens in that area.

The tower at Brent and Becky’s Bulbs is still planned to be built and there is a Ver izon tower near Bethel/Peasley that Open Broadband is in the process of communicating with Verizon about possibly putting equipment on its pole.

Open Broadband is also still working to build a tower near the Harcum area. There are also several other areas that the company is looking into so citizens can have access to fixed wireless.

Currently only 16 homes under grant funding, with five homes being under VATI, have access to broadband in Gloucester County. Only 133 homes in the county qualified for the VATI grant and the ARPA grant should provide service to the rest of the county, which is about 2,500 homes that do not have access to service. Equipment has already been purchased for homes to have fixed wireless access.

The last issue that Beach discussed was Gloucester’s Broadband Equity and Deployment (BEAD) program. BEAD is a federal and state partnership that uses federal funds to provide every citizen with broadband access. This would be at no cost to the county or its citizens. The vendor would take on the cost whether that be Cox, Verizon or a different vendor. This deployment is not expected to be completed until about 4-5 years from now.

Reid explained that Open Broadband is still continuing to do installations in the county and that the speeds that they have are above the VATI grant requirements, which is (25 Megabits per second download x 3 Mbps upload) and the BEAD requirements which is (100 Mbps upload x 20 Mbps download).

Reid also showed the installs at different locations in the county and what the speeds were, including a Wi-Fi speed test done during the Daffodil Festival. He also showed the equipment on towers the county such as the Page water tower and the amount of Tarana fixed wireless coverage that it gets.

He explained that one of the real challenges is how spread apart the homes are and how only a few of those areas can accommodate a tower to reach those homes.

He explained in further detail about the issues with Verizon about putting equipment on its tower at Gloucester Point.

Reid also said that Open Broadband is continuing its marketing efforts by placing Facebook ads, mailers and emails. They will also consider a possible revised layout by putting towers in other locations and adding additional equipment to the landfill tower and the tower at James Store.

Approximately $3.1 million was the cost for the Open Broadband project in ARPA and capital funds to ensure that unserved areas in the county would have access to broadband. About $600,000 of that money is unspent to date.

“We (the county) paid $140,000 per home to connect 16 homes and I understand that not everybody wants the service for whatever reason, but that’s a disappointing number,” said Petsworth District Supervisor Ken Gibson. “When this contract was entered, I believe the numbers were 14 percent of our county was underserved with broadband. They did not have broadband available, which equates to 2,500 residents, most of whom live in the Petsworth District. And almost three years later, of those 2,500 residents, 16 homes have service and the remainder apparently does not.”

Gibson also talked about Open Broadband’s website that states that, compared to fiber or cable, fixed wireless is much faster to deploy. He also pointed out that Open Broadband said that one of the obstacles that it had was not having the right equipment, but it states on their website that each technology and equipment is carefully selected and asked why the correct equipment wasn’t selected.

“The equipment (Nokia) that was purchased at the time with the grant money (ARPA) was what we had researched to be the best at the time,” Gibson said. “Since then, this product that we are now using from Tarana has been developed so we took down the equipment from internationally known Nokia. Took it off the landfill tower, took it off the North Tower, as well as, we had one on top of the water tower here (Main Street tower) we took that down. At our expense, we put back up the Tarana equipment which has performed much better than Nokia.”

Open Broadband will be the topic of another update in November. Supervisors will hold a joint meeting with the school board on Tuesday at the T.C. Walker Education Center.