RISON - More than 20 people, including local legislators and state agency representatives, were on hand Tuesday night to discuss the options regarding the expansion of fiber optic broadband internet service into Cleveland County.
The new ownership of ARKO, the parent company of Cleveland County Telephone, is currently installing fiber optic cable for customers within the Rison and Kingsland city limits. Tuesday’s meeting focused on taking that fiber optic service beyond the those two communities and into the county.
Marcus Bott, vice president of operations for ARK-O, who was at Tuesday’s meeting, said a contractor is currently “blowing” the fiber optic cable into the underground conduit that was previously installed at Rison. He said ARK-O will begin contacting customers this week to begin identifying where to place the equipment that will connect the structure to the new cable. It will be about two months before everything will be in place to begin making the connections.
Once installed, customers in Rison and Kingsland will have access to broadband internet speeds ranging from 250 megabytes per second (Mbps) to 2 gigabytes per second (Gbps). One gigabyte is equal to 1,000 megabytes of speed.
Tuesday night’s meeting held at the Hall-Morgan Veterans Building in Rison was organized by the Accelerate Cleveland County broadband planning committee. Cleveland County is one of five communities in the state that is part of the Accelerate Arkansas rural broadband planning initiative.
Each community in the program goes through a 15-week training process to develop a comprehensive broadband plan that will be used to attract grants and other investments to bring high-speed broadband to the county.
Accelerate Cleveland County has made it a goal to provide fiber optic internet access to every household in the county that can provide speeds of at least 100 Mbps for both download and upload.
Bill C...
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