The City of Levelland has brought in Connected Nation Engineering and Technical Services who has had a crew traveling the streets of Levelland this past week conducting a broadband study.
In earlier city council meetings for the City of Levelland, City Manager Brandon Anderson brought the topic of broadband funding coming from the state level. From those discussions with council, the group unanimously approved the company Connected Nation to come to Levelland to conduct a broadband survey of the city for future purposes.
“What we were hearing at the time and still do now is there’s a lot of broadband money coming from the federal government,” said Anderson. “A lot of that broadband money was divided up among the states. We’re still in the process of finding out exactly how that money is going to be made available to increase connectivity for Texas.”
While the money is available for Texas, Anderson and the city are looking at the funding in rural Texas and in particular last mile service which is what’s considered the very end of the line.
Anderson explained that the national standard for connectivity is a very minimal standard and it’s been measured in the past during the census that will contact one residence within the census tract and ask them about their connectivity.
“The requirement for that connectivity is minuscule,” said Anderson. “To say that we are connected all over Hockley County including Levelland, you could make that one phone call and get the right household and they can say they’ve got great connection. We realized the case is that we’re not very well connected we do have gaps and we do have a lot of connectivity that’s lacking in this part of west Texas.”
Once the realization was made and the talks with council was had, the city contracted Connected Nation to come to Levelland to find out where the holes are, what their concerns are and what needs to be upgraded.
“We believe that this study will help us be eligible for these grants dollars,” explained Anderson. “When I mention “us” being eligible right now, it looks like our providers will have access to that that money.”
If possible, the city would like to provide where the weak spots are to the local providers and can take the information and their knowledge to address those problem areas.
“That’s the perfect scenario or the perfect storm for everyone,” said Anderson. “We also hope that we can utilize some of this connectivity money possibly as a municipality as more details come forward through the state program.”
Whether or not the city would be eligible to apply for some of those funds, they are currently looking at making sure that the city offices have the best connectivity possible as it becomes paramount in emergency situations and emergency management.
“Being prepared and having the ability to have some redundancy if possible, right now is the idea as we’re at the wheel of one particular provider,” explained Anderson. “For whatever reason that goes down then we’re down as a city and businesses in town are the same way”.