Project Results

With the OBDD Grant, Columbia County worked with Vantage Point Solutions (VPS) to prepare a Broadband Feasibility Study. Key highlights from the study, as well as links to the full report are provided below. The study was broken up into 3 phases, listed below:

• Phase 1 - Broadband Provider Analysis looked at the current commercial broadband provider environment by zip code. Sources for this information were publicly available sites providing data that is largely self-reported by the broadband carriers and aggregated into Census Blocks. Individual addresses in any given area may not be served, but if the area has some service by a provider, the entire area is generally reported by the provider as being served.
• Phase 2 - Community Stakeholder Outreach solicited feedback from stakeholders, both residents and businesses, to determine what the actual need is, what the level of satisfaction with existing service is, and what the level of interest would be in a potential municipal broadband offering. This phase included a random residential survey sent to 4001 households, and informal online survey, stakeholder meetings and one-on-one interviews with a variety of business, education, and government entities in the county, and 2 public town hall events.
• Phase 3 - Network Models looked at a variety of options for municipal broadband solutions and made recommendations for Columbia County. An initial, high level cost estimate was provided in this phase, as well as information on possible grant funding opportunities.

After the completion of the 3 phases above, an Executive Summary report was created that combined the information learned through the first 3 phases of the project, and offered recommendations for the County.

This second phase of the study primarily focused on conducting County, community and stakeholder outreach. Stakeholders represent key groups of potential end-users of a municipal network such as citizens, businesses and government agencies. The purpose of the outreach is to obtain feedback regarding current levels of service, future needs and concerns.

The primary outreach tools were a randomly selected household survey and an online business survey. Additional input was gained through a series of stakeholder group meetings, individual interviews, an informal online survey, and two town hall events.

Household Survey

Business Survey

As of the writing of the Report, the informal business survey had only collected 7 responses. As a result, the survey will be left open and VPS will work with the County to find better ways to promote the business survey. However, below we have provided a few pieces of information that give a sense of what businesses are experiencing in Columbia County.

• Bandwidth varied dramatically between 8mpbs to one gigabit.
• Only one business was satisfied with their current internet, the rest were not sure or worse and 6 out of 7 want to switch providers.
• Comments provided include:

o “Asked Comcast: $66,000 to get service run. Century Link wants a 3 year contract at $2,400/month for fiber.”

o “It should be cheaper, especially if you don’t have a bundle.”

Town Halls

Columbia County, in conjunction with Vantage Point Solutions (VPS) held two citizen town hall meetings in Vernonia and St. Helens. A take away from these meetings were that citizens were frustrated with their current services.

Vernonia Town Hall:

• Frontier is only carrier. Internet service is terrible. There are major issues with reliability.
• The further away from the node you live, the worse your service gets.
• Folks would like to work from home but cannot with such poor service.
• It’s hard to get someone out to fix service.
• Some cannot use Netflix after 4pm
• Cell service is inconsistent.
• Internet is expensive for what is offered.

St. Helens Town Hall

• There are big problems with reliability and consistency throughout the County.
• In Scappoose, Century Link frequently goes out and can barely do anything with current connection.
• In Warren, at one location, the only option is Century Link and can’t get more than 1.5 Mbps.
• Would like to start a home business but only option is satellite and that’s not enough bandwidth to do anything.
• Cell service is inconsistent depending on carrier.

VPS provided a variety of potential fiber network models, operational types, and funding mechanisms for this phase of the study. Their recommendation for Columbia County was to implement a middle mile* network that provides a redundant ring backbone connected to community anchor institutions and available for lease. They felt a middle-mile network was a good option for Columbia for the following reasons:

• There are already parts of the County that have adequate residential and business service and so a County-wide last-mile network is not needed;

• There is a middle-mile infrastructure problem County-wide in that there is not enough fiber in many areas to support a robust last mile network, cell service or create a redundant network to safeguard against fiber cuts;

• The County has potential opportunities to work with one or more last-mile provider partners to operate the network and increase last-mile services to areas where it is needed. In addition, in Columbia County, any network would need to begin with middle-mile infrastructure to support any future last-mile network builds.

*A Middle-Mile Network is typically defined as a network that serves community anchor institutions (i.e. Schools, libraries, government buildings, public safety agencies, hospitals, etc.) but does not directly serve homes and businesses.

Based on their data collection and analysis, VPS offered the following 3 recommendations for Columbia County:

Recommendation #2 -

The County should pursue establishing a partnership with a last-mile provider.

For the full text of the project reports, see the More Info page.