The long-awaited construction of a government-sponsored high-speed broadband network that would reach all parts of Erie County is slowly moving forward.
After four years of planning, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Tuesday that construction to lay fiber optic conduit lines has begun and will ramp up this spring.
“What we are announcing today is more than just the plan,” Poloncarz said at the county’s highway barn in the Town of Aurora. “It’s the reality of ErieNet taking shape.”
Flanked by giant, 8-foot-high spools of fiber-optic cable, Poloncarz said some cable has been laid underground in the Town of Boston. While more cable will be laid underground over the winter, he said, most of it will be installed on poles above ground next year.
Poloncarz first announced a $20 million ErieNET initiative in 2019, with hopes that the full, open-access network could be built by the end of 2021. But Covid-19 caused delays. In 2022, the county finally released a draft business plan for a $29 million network that would lay roughly 400 miles of fiber optic lines from as far north as Newstead and Grand Island to as far south as Collins and Concord.
The cost of ErieNET has risen since those first estimates were made, now tagged at $36 million, with a large chunk of that cost covered by American Rescue Plan dollars and $2.8 million in county funding, according to the county.
While wealthier suburban communities in the region have high-grade networks with fast download speeds, much of Buffalo and rural towns to the south and east do not. This digital divide became more stark when…
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