Orange County announced a new partnership this week with NorthState to provide 100 percent fiber-optic internet service to underserved areas. This project is one of the largest partnerships in state history and also achieves a long-standing goal for the county.

The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve the project Tuesday.

Commissioner Sally Greene co-chaired the Orange County Broadband Task Force. She said the county was initially seeking a private internet service provider to deliver fiber to approximately 5,200 homes in rural areas of the state with no internet or poor internet. But NorthState – a high-speed internet service in North Carolina and Virginia –  had bigger plans. 

“We got a provider who is willing to comply with all of our requests, and is eager to be in the Orange County market,” Greene said. “They are going to expend their own resources to serve this higher number 9,800, close to 10,000 homes that they’ve identified.”

Beyond just providing new service to underserved residents, NorthState’s broadband will become a competitive option for 18,000 other homes and businesses in the county.

Commissioner Earl McKee, the other co-chair of the task force, said residents can view a service map and see lists of addresses touched by the program.

“This list will be life changing for a lot of people,” McKee said. “The original impetus for moving forward with this, the idea was because of the children and the school children and virtual learning.”

McKee said the pandemic changed our way of life. People rely on broadband for almost everything now.

“​​It’s become a life experience,” McKee said. “So the government is not going to move forward with it like electrification in the 30s. It’s not going to move forward, like the phone service providers, in the 40s 50s and 60s. It became a matter of if we don’t do it, who will?”

The cost of broadband is millions of dollars. But Greene said Orange County is using funding from American Rescue Plan Act funding to begin the project. 

“From the get go in this process, we said, we got COVID relief money, we’ve got ARPA money, we’re putting $5 million on the table,” Greene said. “We ended up doubling that to make the contract work. Essentially, we are leveraging $10 million to gain an additional $35 million for a total of $45 million investment in Orange County and fiber to the home.”

NorthState is slated to begin installation of 990 miles of fiber in the next few weeks with the goal of service available by next spring in order to utilize that federal funding.

 

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