I’m waiting anxiously for and watching closely the arrival of high speed Internet access to our part of the North Country and according to this recent article it looks as though it may only be a couple months more wait—another very long two months of sluggish dial-up. I’m thrilled it’s coming.
Broadband installation working its way through Roscommon County
Charter Communications has begun its $7.5 million upgrade project that will bring broadband service to the Roscommon County area.
Broadband provides the capability to transmit voice, video and data information simultaneously on one network.
Charter will be able to offer high-speed Internet, Music Choice (an uninterrupted music service available to residential and commercial customers) and more digital channels in addition to basic and expanded cable TV. In the future, it will offer HDTV, high-definition television. Cable crews have been working in St. Helen and will move to other portions of Roscommon County where Charter cable TV is currently offered.
Expanded service
Operations Manager Ed Kavanaugh said Charter hopes to have the communities of Backus, Beaver Creek, Denton, Gerrish, Higgins, Lyon, Lake, Markey, Richfield, Roscommon and South Branch completed by November, “depending on how things go.”
Internet price packages (which are in addition to the cable TV bill) are $29.99 and $39.99. Kavanaugh said the expanded service offers more bandwidth. The cheaper package is 384 kbps and the high-end version is 3 Mbps (a typical dial-up Internet system is 56 kbps). He said customers can rent external modems (a small box outside the computer) monthly as part of their package, or they may purchase one. If the individual’s computer is in a different room than the television, a new jack would need to be installed and a splitter put in place. No new line is required from the street to the house because Charter’s cable is already in place. And because the modem is always “on,” the phone line is not tied up while surfing the web or emailing.
Doing the work
Project Manager Brian Pitts of Cable Construction, Iron Mountain, said he is in charge of the St. Helen, West Branch, Skidway Lake and Houghton Lake portions of the project. He is overseeing a crew from T & T Utility of Merrill.
By Aug. 19, Pitts had called Miss Dig, the state agency that locates utilities, and the shoulder of Artesia Beach Road in St. Helen was peppered with gas line flags so the T & T crew would know where not to dig. Using a vibrating plow to feed the duct into a four feet-deep channel, the men can lay one to two miles of duct per day, Pitts said. The machine also buries a warning tape two feet deep that warns potential diggers of the cable’s location. For digging under driveways and roads, Pitts said, a directional bore machine does the digging.
Once in place, the orange duct is soon filled with fiber optic cables. Pitts said about 7,000 feet of fiber is pulled through each section of duct. Where two sections meet, pull boxes are installed. (If the fibers were pulled continually down the line, Pitts said, they would be under too much pressure and the pull boxes limit the tension.) Kavanaugh added that the fiber is looped as far as it can be to reduce the number of splices; the fewer splices, the less loss of light from the fibers.
Pitts said in St. Helen there are nine sections, or “nodes,” consisting of between 300 to 500 homes, and there are a specified number of fibers per node. The hub site, technically termed a “head end,” of the system is at a tower near the old ski resort by I-75. Kavanaugh said the underground fibers are distributed to the nodes and the Internet data stream is then distributed to the coax cable which is delivered to homes.
Pitts said once the fibers are placed in the ducts, it will be another one week to 10 days before service is available in St. Helen.
In addition, Kavanaugh said, crews will also work on above-ground lines that do the same thing as the underground lines, but are used in some places where it may be cheaper or easier to install. Customers will experience brief outages during construction, and all efforts will be made to restore service before prime time television hours.