Clear Creek Communications Awarded 6.9M from USDA ReConnect 3 Loan for Fiber Optic Internet Upgrades
Feb 2, 2022 | posted by Clear Creek Communications
Clear Creek Communications is pleased to announce it has been awarded a $6.9 million low interest loan from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Services ReConnect Program Round 3. These funds will help deliver cutting-edge fiber optic broadband service to the greater Redland community.
The loan lays the foundation for the first phase of crucial broadband infrastructure upgrades for the 116-year-old cooperative. This new system will deliver internet speeds up to 2 Gigabits (2,000 Megabits per second) through dedicated Fiber to the Home connections. The project area for this initial phase consists of 500 homes in the rural portion of Clear Creek’s service area in the greater Springwater Corridor just west of the Clackamas River.
“This project will start to add Redland members to the national fiber footprint,” stated Clear Creek Communications President, Jay Henke. “It will also better support the growing number of internet-connected devices the average subscriber has in their home today like smartphones, tablets, gaming systems, health trackers and doorbell cameras.”
The fiber project is expected to start being engineered in the latter part of 2022 with the initial conversions occurring in 2023. It is anticipated to take 3 years to complete the conversion of these 500 addresses, but is the first of many more fiber upgrades for the service area.
Fiber connections, especially in more rural areas like Redland, establish a future-proof connection that will help to bridge the digital divide, keep jobs local, stimulate the local economy, allow more working and learning from home. These speeds will delight at-home business owners with file transfer time, thrill online gamers with very low latency and high upstream bandwidth, rock music downloads with more downloads per minute, and amaze video conferencing and web cam users with its high-end streaming ability.
About Fiber Optic Technology
Fiber optics are the pinnacle of high-speed broadband technology and support download and upload speeds much greater than traditional copper or cable lines. The need for quality, reliable internet connections has never been greater as individuals and businesses shift to working and learning from home yet only 43% of US homes currently have access to this connection.
Fiber networks are buried rather than aerial so are far less susceptible to incremental weather.
Fiber is highly reliable, so downtime is rare.
Fiber can carry up to 20,000 times more content than a copper cable. For example, one copper cable can accommodate 50 telephone calls yet one fiber strand can accommodate 1,000,000 telephone calls.
Fiber offers faster download speeds. A 4 GB Ultra HD movie will download in 11 minutes, 37 seconds on a 50 Mbps connection, but just 34 seconds total on a 1 Gbps connection.
Fiber installed directly into a subscriber’s home can increase the property value by more than 3-percent, according to the Fiber Broadband Association.
Fiber connections attract and retain talented workers to the area and reduces the local carbon footprint as working from home results in fewer commutes.
Fiber assists local commerce and businesses with seamless payments, options for customer WiFi, and reliable connections for employees.
Funding Source
The ReConnect Program is an innovative program that offers unique federal financing and funding options in the form of grants, loans, and combinations of the two to facilitate broadband deployment in areas of rural America that currently lack sufficient access to quality internet. Priority was awarded for projects that propose to deliver higher capacity connections to rural homes, businesses, and farms in severely underserved areas of the nation. More information on the ReConnect Program can be found at www.USDA.gov/ReConnect.