Another Door County town is in a partnership to get fiber-optic, high-speed internet

INSTITUTE – The Town of Sevastopol is the latest in Door County to enter into a partnership to bring high-speed internet via fiber optic cable to its residents and businesses.

The town and AT&T will work on a public-private project that will make broadband available to all of its approximately 2,000 addresses within two years, according to a Feb. 12 news release from the company. The town board approved the partnership in January.

“In today’s digital age, fast connectivity is crucial to everyday life," Sevastopol Town Chair Dan Woelfel said in the release. "Bringing AT&T Fiber to Sevastopol is a great step forward in continuing to improve the quality of life for residents, businesses, and visitors in our community."

Planning and engineering work will begin in spring. The complete network buildout is expected to be finished within two years, but Woelfel said AT&T will hook up customers as work is completed and broadband becomes available along stretches of the network.

Some parts of town currently have high-speed availability from Charter Communications, aka Spectrum, but Woelfel said most of it is limited to sections near the Lake Michigan shoreline, with little available inland.

"High speed is available from Charter, generally on the lakeshore and some on the inner part of town away from the lake," Woelfel said to the Advocate. "Otherwise, the inner part has a variety of providers, but none truly has high-speed internet."

The effort to bring broadband to all of the town's addresses has been in the works at least a couple years, Woelfel said. The idea really took hold during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools closed and children had to take classes online. He said schools provided hot spot cards to students in areas with poor internet access to boost their Wi-Fi connection, but many children in the town still struggled with internet speeds and needed to go to extra lengths to make it work.

"What started us on this whole endeavor was during COVID, our school kids had no access to high-speed internet," Woelfel said.

Woelfel said the plan would offer "significantly greater speeds," starting at 300 megabytes per second (Mbps) for uploads and 300 Mbps for downloads, and cost less than Spectrum's high-speed internet rate for the area. Charter has plans offering up to 1 gigabyte per second for uploads, but Woelfel said download speeds are much slower without a more expensive plan. He said he also expects the new broadband service to be more efficient because of fiber instead of coaxial cables.

"The key for us is, it's less expensive, higher speed and fiber," Woelfel said.

The cost of this public-private project is $7.4 million. Woelfel said AT&T is picking up 70% of the cost, about $5.18 million, and the town is responsible for 30%, about $2.22 million. The town has applied for an $800,000 grant for the project, and Woelfel said it plans to apply for other grants as they become available.

Woelfel said the town website, townfosevastopolwi.gov, regularly will provide updated information on what's going on with the project and how to sign up for broadband. People also can visit fiber.att.com to learn about AT&T Fiber and sign up to be notified when service will be available at their address at att.com/notifyme.

The partnership with Sevastopol is AT&T's most recent effort to widen the availability of high-speed internet in rural areas of Door County. The company in late December announced a similar public-private project with the Town of Egg Harbor that is expected to start shortly and can bring AT&T Fiber to 2,100 customers there within two years.

Also in Door County, Quantum Technologies recently completed the first phase of its project with the Washington Island Electric Cooperative to bring fiber-optic broadband internet access to all of the Island's residents and businesses by 2027.

Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.

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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Another Door County town launches partnership for fiber-optic broadband