Alexander County November Updates

Taylorsville Apple Festival – Marketing and Free WiFi

We loved offering free WiFi at the Taylorsville Apple Festival and having a tent at the festival where we educated people about fixed wireless and informed them about the pilot program in Alexander County. We signed people up for the waitlist during the festival and gave out fliers for them to take to their neighbors. There were over 200 connections during peak periods of the Apple Festival.

Alexander County Waitlist is Over 800 and Growing

We added over 250 new sign-ups to the list since October 1st.
The waitlist has a small purple circle around the tower showing the area that is within 1/2 a mile of the tower. If you want to see if your home is within half a mile of the tower you can use this link to pull up the map and enter your address to see if it’s in the November target installation area. The next area where we plan to focus is Rocky Face Park with a micro-PoP at either the nearby farm or an Energy United Pole (as indicated by the larger blue circles). In parallel, we will be installing other businesses and homes, typically one neighborhood at a time.

It’s color-coded by zip code. The pilot project focuses on downtown Taylorsville, Rocky Face, Hiddenite, and Stony Point.

So the best way to get broadband to your home faster is to have all your neighbors get on the waitlist!

Help spread the word. Forward this newsletter to your neighbor.

Alexander county Open Broadband wait list map represented by colored dots — Pictured: Each small dot represents one Alexander residential or business location on the Alexander county Open Broadband waitlist.

Linney Mountain Tower Preparation

Last month (link) we explained that the reason why we selected Linney Mountain to be our first tower. We have our equipment out at the tower and our crew will be there this week to install on the tower. We will test and tune the antennas this week and begin installing our initial customers on our (those within half a mile of the tower) next week.

Kent with his co-worker and waste in different pics

Google Maps – Energy United Poles

It seems that Energy United Poles may be anywhere in the county even if you do not have Energy United as your Energy Provider. We will be reaching out to Energy United to try and get a list of Energy United Pole locations with GPS coordinates. We believe that Energy United will be a valuable partner for this broadband rollout and look forward to working with them. We don’t have any ask right now. However, as we consider our expansion options, if you notice an Energy United pole on your property and it’ above most of the trees and mountains around it, you may want to send me the GPS coordinates, with the Energy United Pole Number, your address and contact information, and some pictures of the view. I will include instructions with a link in the next newsletter to make this easier, once I coordinate with some others.

Want to help speed things up?

We are interviewing and hiring local Internet service testers (see job description) and are looking to hire entry-level installation technicians (see job description). Interested applicants should email a resume to info@openbb.net for consideration.