Richland Baptist Church in Stafford County was crawling with federal officials and black SUVs on Monday, but the contingent was there to celebrate, not investigate.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her troops, along with Comcast and Stafford officials, descended on the property to tout a public–private partnership that brought high-speed broadband to the western part of the county.
“While over 650 homes may seem like a small number to some, I assure you it is huge for us and means the world to our residents,” said Meg Bohmke, chair of the Stafford Board of Supervisors.
She described the situation before high-speed internet came to the neighborhood. Parents often called the county because they had to drive their children to a local library to access the internet and do their homework. New residents to the area complained about the lack of service and people trying to sell their homes couldn’t do so for the same reason, Bohmke said.
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Money provided by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was a “game-changer,” Bohmke said. The ARPA money funded Virginia’s Telecommunications Initiative, or VATI, and a grant allowed Stafford County and Comcast to work together on the project.
“It connected a significant portion of the county (which had) no hope of being connected as there was not enough density and it did not make financial sense for providers to run cable and internet,” Bohmke said. “We have heard from many residents in the project footprint who are ecstatic at finally working effectively from home and completing schoolwork.”
On Monday, Yellen first visited a staging site down Richland Road, off Cascade Lane, where trucks from Xfinity, the residential component of Comcast, set up a display. The treasury secretary followed cues from Jody Gehring, a network maintenance technician, to splice the tube of 12 fibers, each as thin as a hair — even as Gehring suggested Yellen not try that at home.
The technician also demonstrated speeds available in the area, and when the measurement reached 2,110 megabytes per second, Gehring said, “That is awesome.”
Yellen asked about devices that go in and outside the home at one display and listened as Delmer “Smokey” Seal, construction manager for Virginia for Comcast, described a directional boring tool. The million-dollar piece of machinery bores underground to install cables without disturbing roads, driveways or lawns. After installation, there’s no need to put down straw or grass seed.
Yellen was particularly impressed by that as well as a utility location system — a device that looked like a neon green lamppost and acts like a metal detector to locate underground pipe.
“She asked a lot of good questions,” Seal said.
Back at the church, the group held a roundtable in the fellowship hall. Videographers from Comcast and Yellen’s team as well as reporters from various media outlets, locally and nationwide, crowded into a small area in the back of the room. Yellen, Bohmke and Broderick Johnson, Comcast’s executive vice president for public policy and digital equity, offered remarks.
Johnson said rural broadband projects like the one in Stafford not only connect people with skills training, health care and education, but they also expand economic opportunities.
“As I’ve traveled across the country, I’ve seen first-hand the transformative power our partnerships can have on communities, the many lives being changed,” he said.
In the last three years, Comcast has invested nearly $900 million in technology and infrastructure in Virginia.
The state chose to spend its entire allotment of Capital Projects Funds through ARPA on expanding high-speed internet infrastructure to reach the nearly 20% of locations in Virginia that have lacked access, Yellen said.
Nearly $600 million was allocated in Virginia to expand access. Virginia’s share was among $10 billion in Capital Projects Funds available through the act to states, territories and tribal governments.
Yellen noted that while broadband became particularly critical during the COVID-19 pandemic when other options weren’t available, there’s little one can do in a modern economy without an internet connection.
“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury,” she told the group. “It stopped being that a long time ago. Now, high-speed internet is an economic necessity … whether you’re 10 years old, or 30, or 60, no matter where you work and live.”