Arkansas state lawmakers are hard at work determining which technologies will be needed to connect every residence and business in the state to high-speed broadband. During the meeting of the Advanced Communications and Information Technology Committee on Monday, November 16, state geographic information officer, Shelby Johnson, told members that fiber-optic networks will prove to be too expensive for use throughout the state.
Johnson was quoted in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, “Fiber to the home is what everyone really desires the most because of the insanely fast speeds, but the cost is cost-prohibitive in many places.” The conclusion arrived at is that a fiber-optic only network would be too expensive to install in the vast rural regions in the state.
Instead, Johnson said fixed wireless networks are gaining in popularity, even though wireless networks in Arkansas are not fast enough to be considered broadband by Federal Communications Commission standards. According to Johnson, towers still have to connect to a wired network, and homes would need a line of sight to the tower to connect to the network, which would make this type of network useful in the Delta region, but not useful at all in the mountainous areas.
Don McDaniel, enterprise state network division director for the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, told the committee the cost of infrastructure has been restricting the expansion of broadband providers, even though there have been calls for streamlining the approval process for towers and allowing access to existing water towers for installing wireless network equipment.
The committee plans to continue meeting throughout the state in the near future, and gather information from the public, and internet service providers.
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