Former Starkville Chief Administrative Officer Lynn Spruill spent Tuesday night surfing the Internet and streaming videos as the city’s first resident to experience high-speed, fiber optic access from C Spire’s Fiber to the Home initiative.
Spruill’s home within the C Spire-designated South Montgomery “fiberhood” was chosen to serve as the launch point for the company’s 1 gigabit residential Internet service in Starkville. C Spire representatives gathered at her Greenbriar subdivision abode Wednesday to celebrate the work that went in to transition Fiber to the Home from an idea to a reality in roughly 12 months.
“Netflix’s (picture quality) looked really good,” she said jokingly to corporate representatives outside her home.
Besides improving residents’ connectivity, officials have championed Fiber to the Home’s ability to provide a boon in terms of economic development and improve the city’s overall quality of life.
Fiber to the Home’s speed, which the company markets as up to 100 times faster than most current residential broadband services, can provide residents, businesses and governmental agencies with technological flexibility previously unseen in the area, said C Spire Chief Operating Officer Kevin Hankins.
“A year has gone by, and we’ve done great things together,” he said. “It is important to think about what this service enables. This service … provides schools and children a better competitive advantage through the use of digital learning tools. Think about the health care possibilities, like remote patient monitoring; think about small business owners and what they can do; think about the economic development possibilities.”
Becoming one of the first Mississippi cities with the service was an important goal for city leaders. Starkville was one of nine cities to qualify for the first crack at Fiber to the Home, and is only one of three with active users. C Spire previously turned on the service in Quitman and also recognized the same milestone Wednesday in Ridgeland.
Company officials touted the year turnaround from announcement to service, comparing it to the three years Google took to select, wire and provide services in Kansas City, Kan.
“We believe this is a technological breakthrough, and it offers potential that we can’t even enumerate,” said Mayor Parker Wiseman. “(Economic development) is process that doesn’t get unlocked until you provide the technological breakthrough … and combine it with the enormous capacity of the human mind. We’re now no longer talking about potential. We stand here today at that intersection where a technological breakthrough is combined with the human mind, and we’ll begin to see, through the efforts of our citizens exploring this service and thinking of the new things it can do, what the future can hold.”
Last month, the Hiwassee neighborhood became the fourth “fiberhood” to exceed homeowner pre-registration requirements and qualify for engineering and construction efforts. Other areas, including South Montgomery, Timbercove and the Cotton District, qualified earlier this year.
Fiber optic installations are under way in the Timbercove/College Station/Polos “fiberhood,” and the neighborhood should be the second to provide 1 gigabit Internet connections to potential customers.
Work remains in the Hiwassee/Reed Road/Hospital and Cotton District/Downtown/Historic Central Starkville areas.
Five other Starkville “fiberhoods” have yet to qualify for the service. The Oktibbeha Gardens/Old West Point Road neighborhood is about half way – the closest of the remaining “fiberhoods” – to its pre-registration mark for engineering and construction services.
C Spire officials previously said the company is not expected to connect non-qualifying neighborhoods to the service until they reach pre-registration marks, which means some portions of Starkville could remain without the service indefinitely.
When C Spire announced last year that Batesville, Clinton, Corinth, Hattiesburg, Horn Lake, McComb, Quitman, Ridgeland and Starkville would vie to become the first Mississippi cities to receive the high-speed Internet service, they divided each city into “fiberhoods” based upon geography and population density. Pre-registration fees of $10 were also used to measure interest.
For current customers, the Internet option is available for $70 per month. More expensive options are available for bundling a combination of Internet, TV and home phone services, or for all three. Non-customers must pay an additional $10 per month on all packages.
C Spire also opened a $23 million commercial data center in this Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park earlier this month.
Carl Smith covers Starkville and Oktibbeha County for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @StarkDispatch
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