It has been months since we’ve had much to report. Good things are happening, but they take time. September is here and I have a little bit to share.

First, Holland BPW created a position for Manager of Broadband Services and hired local resident Pete Hoffswell. If Pete sounds familiar, it might be because he’s on our homepage as a long-time advocate of broadband. He’s been working to connect Holland people since the days of modems and ISDN. Needless to say, we’re excited both for this new position and that Pete took the job.

Next, the BPW is reviewing engineering proposals to bring internet to all of Downtown Holland. This involves getting detailed schematics and construction bids to hook everyone up. Nothing is certain yet, but BPW could be hooking up people early in 2017 if everything goes well.

This means we still don’t have a definitive plan for city-wide rollout (or wider). We’ll continue pushing for that. We hope a successful Downtown project will help spur action.

Finally, BPW shared with us that their fiber network continues to grow:

Right now, we are averaging about 6 new connections to the HBPW fiber network monthly. These connections are to various buildings throughout the service area, and built to support our current connectivity options - Dark Fiber lease (Point to Point) and Active Ethernet (IP Transport) offerings. As we build these new fiber paths, we also consider future use for them. We consider neighboring premises connectivity opportunities as well as possible future GPON (Internet) service.

These connections represent larger businesses that can afford expensive connections. We still want to provide high-speed bandwidth to every home and business. BPW’s network is a great investment, and we want to see it used to benefit the entire community.