(August 30, 2024) – More rural areas of Spartanburg County will have access to high-speed internet by the end of 2024 with efforts continuing to provide access to underserved communities.
North Carolina-based Ripple Fiber announced plans to partner with internet service provider Open Broadband to build a fiber internet network in Woodruff for 750 homes making the service available in December.
“We are expanding all over North and South Carolina and Woodruff is part of that expansion plan,” Ripple Fiber CEO Greg Wilson told The Post and Courier. “We are expanding in the Lexington and Greenville area as well. We are looking to bring fiber internet to other rural markets but we haven’t identified them all yet.”
Wilson said about 25,000 homes in the Greenville and Simpsonville market will soon have access to high-speed internet through the company’s fiber network and about 15,000 homes in Lexington will have access to the service.
“We are constantly looking for opportunities to do it with our own private capital,” Wilson said. “In some more rural areas we need government support.”
Since the pandemic there’s been a push to provide rural areas better access to high-speed internet. The pandemic showed there was more need for it since students and workers were having to work remotely. In some cases, especially in rural areas, there was no access to high-speed internet because the networks didn’t exist to support it. In Spartanburg County there’s been increased efforts to better serve rural areas with broadband.
Woodruff, Pauline, Chesnee, Pacolet, Campobello and Landrum were areas identified by the county lacking access to broadband. By the end of 2024, most of these areas will have new access to high-speed internet. Spartanburg County Council in March 2022 approved $4.5 million of the county’s American Rescue Plan funding to hire companies to expand high-speed internet in underserved areas of the county.
The county awarded Spectrum/Charter a contract to build the infrastructure and expand high-speed internet service by the end of 2024. More than 6,200 residents in rural areas will have new access to high-speed internet that is part of the county’s overall plan to have 332 miles of new fiber optic cable installed. The total cost of the project is about $14 million, according to the county.
“The pandemic showed us that broadband is not a luxury but is a necessity,” Spartanburg County Councilman David Britt said. “We made a serious commitment and teamed up with broadband providers to give access to rural areas.”
According to the South Carolina Broadband Office, Spartanburg County has 144,000 households that have high-speed internet.
There are 5,946 households in the county that do not have high-speed internet.
Source: The Post and Courier Spartanburg (postandcourier.com)