With the completion of a 108-mile underground fiber route, Astound Broadband has brought broadband to 270 homes in rural Tillamook County, Oregon.
The press release says it was the first time the homes had high-speed broadband, though it is unclear if they previously had any connectivity at all.
The Astound fiber connection runs from a submarine cable station south of Pacific City to Hillsboro, Oregon. Tillamook is along the way. Some of the funding from the project comes from Amazon Web Services’ investment in the Bifrost submarine cable system. The cost of the project and other details are not mentioned in the press release.
“Bringing high-speed fiber internet to the rural Highway 6 corridor is a significant milestone, as it provides much needed connectivity for underserved area residents and sets a foundation for other organizations and agencies to further expand,” Matt Updenkelder, Astound Broadband’s vice president of infrastructure development for Oregon said in a press release.
“This build is an example of how investments in a submarine cable system can bring vastly improved connectivity to nearby areas. It is also testament to hard work and perseverance, as our crews encountered extremely rocky and difficult terrain along much of the route, in the process of completing all the underground construction.”
Astound clearly is a big believer in leveraging underseas cable, coupling the press release on the news about the Oregon project with a white paper that makes the case for the approach.
The executive summary essentially says that people interested in global connectivity should look down, not up:
“[T]he notion of a floating cloud providing the backbone that connects the global Internet couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, the vast majority of data being shared travels undersea, then underground, and occasionally across utility poles, to get to where it’s going and back again.
“In actuality, there are endless miles of super-high-speed fiber optic cables crisscrossing the bottom of the oceans, connecting continents, countries, and the world’s local communities with the real-time information that connects us — or, at least, most of us.”
Astound Broadband also operates on land, of course. The company is upgrading its cable broadband infrastructure to support multi-gigabit speeds and DOCSIS 4.0. Early last month, the company said it would use equipment from Harmonic for the network upgrades.
