Entire southern Indiana city to have gigabit network
JASPER, Ind. (AP) - A telecommunications company will wire every home and business in a southern Indiana city with fiber-optic lines that will provide Internet service so fast that a two-hour high-definition movie can be downloaded in less than a minute, officials said Thursday.
Smithville Telecom's wiring of Jasper, a community of some 15,000 people about 40 miles northeast of Evansville, will take about three years to complete.
"Jasper residents will have access to a full gigabit fiber network, which will feature high-speed in-home and business wireless gigabit connectivity," Mayor Terry Seitz said at a news conference. "The Jasper project represents a true 'fiber-to-the-premise' installation, with no traditional copper-based or coaxial cable involved."
Gigabit connectivity is 1,000 times faster than one megabit, Smithville Telecom CEO Darby McCarty said. The company, a subsidiary of Ellettsville-based Smithville Communications, will cover the approximately $7 million cost of building the network.
Once it's built, residents and businesses will be able to access the fiber-optic network by becoming Smithville customers, The Herald reported (http://bit.ly/17Mrh15 ).
Seitz said the city's decision to leverage fiber service for municipal departments into "a complete extension of fiber throughout the community will bring state-of-the-art communications capabilities."
"As technology becomes more immersed into our society I believe what we are beginning today will enable us to accomplish things beyond our wildest imagination in the future," he said.
Engineering planning for the residential and small business sections of the Jasper-Smithville fiber project will take up to nine months to complete, the city and company said in a joint news release. Smithville expects that about one-third of the network will be completed by the end of 2016, another third by the end of 2017 and the last of it by the end of 2018.
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Information from: The Herald, http://www.dcherald.com