Jefferson, GA

“Like every other small community across this country, we too would like to join the conversation about how we can provide our citizens and businesses with adequate broadband services. We take advantage of each other’s ideas and experiences in developing strategies to provide our citizens with what has become an essential service: broadband access.”

“Broadband is essential to modern life. Everything at home and in business and commerce today runs on broadband access. Urban areas with multiple national ISPs have long enjoyed high-speed broadband access. More rural areas have been disadvantaged for some time, due primarily to the lack of competition and costs associated with installation in less dense populations. As quality of life and cost of doing business issues push growth into more rural areas, we must find answers to providing quality broadband as these rural broadband pressures increase.”

“Two years ago, I established a Broadband Advisory Committee at the request of our city council. At that time, City Hall was receiving many calls each week about the poor customer service and lack of speed, much less broadband, from our incumbent provider. The Advisory Committee and City Council pressured the incumbent provider to upgrade their customer service and invest in infrastructure upgrades. While fiber was being laid in new subdivisions, we are now seeing fiber retrofits in the older subdivisions. We also worked to attract competing providers to provide alternatives for our citizens. We still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves a broadband community, but we are making progress.”