JASPER — One area of Jasper now has access to the gigabit fiber network being installed throughout the city.
The area, which Smithville Fiber calls a fiberhood, includes the area roughly encompassed by State Road 56, County Road 400 West, Sweet Gum Drive and Lechner Lane. The area has Red Oak, Deer Creek and Silver Springs subdivisions.
“We’ve completed a gigantic amount of work in planning, engineering and setting up our initial network,” Smithville Fiber President John Patten said, “and we’re right on track.”
Based on a private-public partnership agreement reached in early 2015, Smithville Fiber is constructing a gigabit fiber network in Jasper that includes a fiber-optic ring around the city. The network will feature Smithville’s GigaCity technology, which includes symmetrical high-speed internet up to a full gigabit of speed. Jasper residents and businesses are scheduled to have access to the network by 2018.
Fiber has been installed near 390 homes in the first fiberhood, Smithville’s Jasper project manager Melissa Patee said. Residents at more than 100 homes in the fiberhood have said that they were interested in getting service. Of that, more than 20 homes have connected to the new service and the company has service orders for 53 more homes.
To make the fiber network installation manageable, the company has broken the community into smaller areas, calling them fiberhoods. There will be about 30 fiberhoods total, Patee said.
After the fiber has been installed, the fiberhood will be broken into phases, based on the fiber lines’ route, for workers to come in and splice the line to connect a home to the cabling.
“That needs to be done to turn the customers’ service on,” Patee said. “The whole process is very tedious.”
The first fiberhood has been broken into seven phases, and four of the phases have been activated, she said.
Construction has started in two more fiberhoods. One fiberhood lies west of County Road 400W and runs to the city limit westward toward Ireland. The other runs east of Lechner Lane and extends west to Truman Road, north to Maple Leaf Drive and south to near Andrew Lane.
Smithville has also installed its second of five network cabinets on the north side of the city, near St. Charles Street and Pleasant View Drive. The cabinets house networking equipment for an area of the city. The first one is near Kluemper Road and Evans Lane. Three others will be installed — on the east side of the city, the southeast side near Vincennes University Jasper Campus and on the south side. The company has split the city into five areas, which it is calling slices.
“We are not going to focus on one area and completely build that out,” Patee said. “We want to be building on one to three fiberhoods in each of the slices. By the end of this year or beginning of next year, we want to have an area built or one being built in each of those areas. So we’re trying to hit this aggressively.”
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