School districts weighed in on broadband information for a study that is being completed regarding the availability of broadband service in Carbon County and how to better serve the community.

On Tuesday, representatives from Design Nine Inc., the company hired by Carbon County to complete the rural broadband study, met with technology officials, superintendents and school board members in the hopes of gathering information on what each district can provide to their students.

Design Nine President and CEO Dr. Andrew Cohill and Jack Maytum, senior broadband analyst, co-hosted the virtual meeting.

Cohill told officials that the purpose of the study is “to analyze the current state of broadband in Carbon County; look at future needs, including a gap analysis - what people have now in terms of speed, quality and cost of service, but what kind of connectivity are they likely to have in the future and over the next five to 10 years.”

Cohill also said that the company is doing a lot of mapping of existing fiber infrastructure, wireless towers and demographic issues.

One piece of this puzzle is the schools’ needs for connectivity, both in the classroom, as well as virtual classrooms.

“With so many learning resources now online and over the last two years, the struggle with COVID and distance learning, the need for good, residential, affordable broadband has become urgent,” he said, noting that the survey aims to identify information to help the commissioners understand what is needed and what is already succeeding through the private sector.

Maytum stressed the mapping portion of the study, which will be able to best show the overall picture of current connectivity.

“A goal is to try and determine where there are broadband gaps in the county, because we do not intend to try and duplicate any existing broadband capability, but simply to fill in the gaps where they might exist,” he said. “We don’t expect that we’re going to recommend the county be a broadband service provider or an ISP. We think that the private sector can do that very well. We’re going to leave it up to them and try to assist them when possible.”

“We’re not anticipating that we recommend the county compete with the private sector,” Cohill added. “We have very rarely ever made that recommendation of any of our local government engagements.”

Availability

The group then turned focus on the school districts to see what is available.

In Lehighton, officials said that there have been some improvements in Wi-Fi, but there are still some drops when students are using online learning in the classroom.

The officials in attendance didn’t have specifics on additional details.

One comment made was that fiber optics for broadband is already run to every school district in Carbon County.

Joe Lorah, director of Government and Public Affairs for Blue Ridge Communications, said following the meeting that PenTeleData deals with the schools and reached out to his colleague Scott Hoppel.

Hoppel said, “We do serve all of the CC districts and the vocational technical school with fiber in some manner. I say in some manner because some schools we do their wide area network, others we provide internet, and others we provide connections to the intermediate unit.

“Weatherly we do by leasing fiber from Atlantic Broadband back to a meet point we have.

“Most districts typically would get dedicated fiber optic based services run to them,” Hoppel added. “Dedicated fiber optic based services are superior to broadband in that they have Service Level Agreements that offer high performing service, uptime and performance metrics to meet the demands of mission critical applications. Some of the infrastructure that allows us to serve the schools with dedicated fiber optic services can also typically be used to help facilitate broadband services to not only the school but nearby areas as well.”

Fiber connections

Dr. Jerome Brown, director of Technology & Information Services for the Jim Thorpe Area School District, outlined what is being done for the approximately 1,800 families in the schools.

He said that there is a fiber connection to all buildings that is a 1 Gig connection. The services are provided through both PenTeleData and the CLIU-21.

Jim Thorpe Area School District covers a large area, from the center of Jim Thorpe, outward to near Jonas.

Brown noted that the challenges the schools faced with COVID was getting enough hot spots to the families and this was completed with a partnership with T-Mobile and Verizon. Approximately 60 families needed these hot spots, which the district paid for.

Jim Thorpe officials concluded that virtual learning was successful in the district.

In Palmerton, Dan Heaney, director of Curriculum, Instruction & Technology, said that the school district has Wi-Fi access with a 1 Gig connection throughout all of its schools and plans to upgrade to 3 Gig service in July.

“We’re pretty fortunate that we have fiber lines between all of our buildings,” he said. “PTD has been great. They’re really helpful for us. We deal with them directly for all of our internet access.”

Heaney said that the district did not provide hot spots to the handful of families in need, but reimbursed them on internet bills based on certain criteria.

“We wanted to make sure that the kids had access to their education,” he said.

The districts also discussed what students are using to connect to broadband service, whether it is Chromebooks, iPads or other tablets.