USDA Rural Development Awards $21M Loan For Broadband Expansion Project

People living in Cameron, Dallas and Ridgeland can expect access to faster internet within the next several years.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development recently awarded a roughly $21 million loan to a telecom company for a broadband expansion project in rural northwestern Wisconsin.

The money will go toward installing 675 miles of fiber-optic cable to homes across several communities, said Frank Frassetto, state director for USDA Rural Development. He said the service will go beyond the 3-megabit per second download speed the average homeowner had back in 2009.

“You can’t even watch a Netflix movie on that kind of speed,” he said. “As the infrastructure is being upgraded, that’s going to allow people to actually be a part of the 21st century instead of being stuck in the early 2000s.”

Mosaic Telecom plans to provide broadband internet with speeds up to 1-gigabit per second for downloading and uploading content online. The company’s marketing manager Megan Maikowski said they plan to provide high-speed internet to around 2,700 customers in Barron and Dunn counties over the next few years.

“We have copper facilities at this time in some of our areas that we’re replacing with the fiber-optic network,” she said. “Being able to provide a service that is available in urban markets keeps our business customers competitive. A lot of rural farms — they’re able to connect faster with the speeds that they actually need.”

Frassetto said they’re trying to build partnerships with companies and provide an incentive to serve rural areas of the state that may be unserved or underserved. The cost of installing fiber can prove prohibitive in less populated areas.

“The private sector — they’re in the business to make a profit and they want to see return on investments,” said Frassetto. “You could be in a community where there’s maybe a certain density in a localized area that does have broadband, but the infrastructure is not yet quite built out even in a local town.”

Maikowski said the loan is helping to assist them meet their subscriber’s needs.

“We wouldn’t be able to fund such a large investment on our own upfront,” she said. “Having the loan is key to help us support our community by investing in them.”

Maikowski said they’re installing fiber to around 450 homes in Cameron this year. The company plans to expand broadband to Almena in 2019.