Rural settlement with no broadband installs its own

Frustrated with no broadband Internet service, residents of a rural neighborhood in Louisa County, Virginia (Wikipedia map), installed their own high-speed Internet, Cherney Amhara reports for The Charlottesville Newsplex.

Reedy Creek Property Owners Association President Joe Snyder told Amhara, "The pole that I'm sitting on right now was bought and paid for by the Reedy Creek Property Owners Association. The investment that the property owners made in all this is roughly about $5,000." Snyder, who said when prospective home owners are told the area has no broadband it drives them elsewhere, told Amhara, "Without Internet, basically Louisa and this whole place becomes irrelevant."

The first step was convincing the county to create a process to apply for a permit for neighborhoods to purchase their own Internet service, Amhara writes. Two years later, CVA Link "dug a hole to put the pole purchased by the neighborhood into the ground and the Ethernet cable will run alongside the pole and pass power and data through the antennas. CVA technician Andrew Hollins told Amhara, "The ultimate result of installing these antennas is that we would go to a customers house and install one of these (Customer Premises Equipment) relay to the antenna which would pass bandwidth to it. You would run the cable into the house and you have unlimited internet."

CVA's Brian Gilbreth told Amhara that what normally takes a company months to provide, his can do in hours: "The key difference is wireless. Our wireless link will link back instead of having to lay all those miles and [use] manpower to bury the cable in the ground." (Read more) Louisa County is in the Piedmont, with no mountains to obstruct wireless networks.