Welcome to the First Edition of the Open Broadband Newsletter for Franklin, Granville and Vance Counties
Open Broadband welcomes you to the world of High-Speed Internet.
This newsletter will provide you with information about the current status of Open Broadband’s progress of providing wireless Internet service in your county, updates on ongoing projects and interesting articles about wireless broadband.
Open Broadband has been in discussions with members of the county’s implementation team for the past several months working out details and specifications of the project.
Agreements have been signed with the county and we have mapped out strategic locations to mount our broadcast antennas on county and privately-owned tall assets in order to be able to spread our signal in to the various areas of the county. There will be a scheduled rollout done in designated areas around the broadcast antennas and then progress to the next sector.
We expect to begin installing and testing our broadcast equipment in the early to late spring 2020; and then we estimate residential and business site surveys and installations to begin in early summer 2020.
As part of this initiative, Franklin County will be offering free Public Wi-Fi, through Open Broadband, in Owens Recreational Park on Massenburg Baker Road.
We encourage residents and commercial businesses, if you haven’t already, please visit our website https://openbb.net/home-internet/ and enter your name on our Sign-Up List for Franklin County; this way we can be sure to include you in our testing schedule.
Also, you can keep up to date on progress by visiting our Blog https://openbb.net/blog/.
Additionally, as we expand, if you or someone you know is interested in working for Open Broadband as a site surveyor and/or installer and being part of this initiative for your community and surrounding areas; interested candidates can view our job postings and apply via our website careers page: https://careers.openbb.net/
Open Broadband would like to extend our gratitude to all citizens of Franklin County for their patience while we implement this project. We understand the needs and reliance that everyone has for High-Speed Internet and how it affects your daily lives for commerce, work, education, business, pleasure and entertainment. We are here to help bridge that gap in the underserved rural communities.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Visits Orange County
In February, Open Broadband and Orange County IT hosted a visit from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, to address broadband in rural North Carolina.
WRAL Techwire also attended and posted this story.
https://www.wraltechwire.com/2020/02/21/bringing-broadband-to-thousands-of-underserved-in-orange-county-one-home-at-a-time/.
Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr (right) visited one of Open Broadband’s WISP deployment stations in Cedar Grove Township. He is pictured with Orange County Chief Information Officer Jim Northrup and Open Broadband’s Kent Winrich and Alan Fitzpatrick.
Commissioner Carr posted this video shortly after his visit.
Open Broadband is providing public Wi-Fi within the facility for all users that attend privately held functions as well as providing service during county meetings. This facility also serves as a hub or distribution point for nearby homeowners to subscribe to our service.
Open Broadband is in the process of meeting with the county implementation team and other county representatives to work on plans to map out the locations of broadcast antennas and develop a roll out schedule similar to what we have done with the other counties we provide service to.
The expected time frame for installing broadcast antennas is in the late summer early fall timeframe.
We will post our progress in this monthly newsletter and through the county website and social media outlets as things progress.
https://openbb.net/blog/.
Also, if you haven’t already, please visit our website https://openbb.net/home-internet/ and enter your name on our Sign-Up List for Granville County; this way we can be sure to include you in our testing schedule.
As we begin and start to expand, we will be looking to hire local people to assist us in providing site surveys and installation services. Interested candidates can view our job postings and apply via our website careers page: https://careers.openbb.net/
We expect to begin the initial infrastructure design in the 4th quarter of 2020 and the roll out will be the same as we are doing in other counties.
As we go through this process, we expect to realize and develop other opportunities that the features and benefits of High-Speed Internet can provide to the general public, schools, businesses as well as cities and towns within the county.
We will post our progress in this monthly newsletter and through the county website and social media outlets as things progress.
https://openbb.net/blog/.
Also, if you haven’t already, please visit our website https://openbb.net/home-internet/ and enter your name on our Sign-Up List for Granville County; this way we can be sure to include you in our testing schedule.
As we begin and start to expand, we will be looking to hire local people to assist us in providing site surveys and installation services. Interested candidates can view our job postings and apply via our website careers page: https://careers.openbb.net/
You will be contacted once service is available
Once service is available at your address, we will contact you to schedule a signal test to ensure sufficient wireless signal for broadband.
Once the signal level is confirmed we’ll set up an in-home installation appointment. A team of installers will set up the system, attaching an antenna to the exterior of your house in addition to an interior gateway device.
If we have not contacted you that means service is not available yet. Please be patient and we will contact you when we can schedule your address. We will provide as much advance notice as possible.
If your neighbors have not joined the signup list, encourage them to do so.
Hubs and Towers:
We try to utilize existing tall assets such as water towers, county owned communication towers, barns and silos to connect to our main antennas in order to re-distribute to another area. This is an example of an antenna array mounted on a water tower. These have receiving antennas and also have broadcasting antennas. We then look to establish hub sites to insure a strong enough signal in order to propagate the signal further.Here are examples of the many types of antennas we utilize.
We are expanding our Team
We added a new Area Manager to our team for North-Central NC in January 2020. Alan Helias will be the focal point for all installations, surveys and customer service issues in Franklin, Granville and Vance County as well as other counties in the North-Central part of the state.
Alan can be reached at 919-435-4194 or ahelias@openbb.net.
As we continue to expand, we are looking to interview candidates for Part Time positions of surveyors and installers.
Interested candidates can view our job postings and apply via our website careers page: https://careers.openbb.net/
This is a long journey to build a new network from scratch using fixed-wireless technology in a challenging terrain. We believe everyone deserves access to broadband speeds and our small company is doing our part to fill in gaps where the 50-100 year old large companies have not implemented.
Thank you for your patience and support, while we continue to develop solutions to provide High Speed Broadband to your area and we look forward to serving many of you in 2020.
