While stuck in construction traffic the other day, I thought of the old cliché that there are only two seasons – winter and road construction. But after visiting the Central Valley Independent Network’s (CVIN) offices in Fresno, California this summer, I would add broadband construction as a third season.

For CVIN and all other Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) projects, summer is a time to build. Whether it’s hanging fiber on utility poles or trenching, plowing, and drilling underground, our awardees and their construction crews are busy at work.

Broadband is a world of extremes: it takes heavy-duty, 10-ton equipment to install fiber strands that are as small as a human hair. It takes months and years of hot, sweaty, dust-filled workdays to build a network that will provide massive amounts of data to end users at speeds measured in millionths of a second. It takes hundreds of man-hours, at a pace of 1000 feet per day to install the fiber that will connect our schools and hospitals with resources on the other side of the planet with just the click of a mouse.
As a Federal Program Officer overseeing a number of our BTOP projects, I’m constantly collecting numbers that gauge progress from my awardees: miles of fiber and conduit installed; crews in the field; targets and milestones for connecting community anchor institutions (CAIs) and so-called last mile service providers – all with an eye toward completing the projects on time and on budget. Despite the weekly conference calls, quarterly and annual reporting, and internal analysis at the program office, there’s just no substitute to getting out in the field to understand exactly what our awardees’ crews experience on a daily basis.

Monday was a great day. Under the presidential gaze of nearby Mount Rushmore, I had the honor of participating in the groundbreaking for Project Connect South Dakota – a $25.7 million infrastructure project that will bring fiber optic broadband service to more than 300 community anchor institutions across the state. Based on the enthusiasm of the crowd of state officials, representatives from the partner companies, and journalists, I couldn’t help but feel gratified about how our efforts are coming together and are making a real change in peoples’ lives.

The ceremony (called a celebration by its organizers) was held at the Rapid City Regional Hospital and was keynoted by Governor Rounds, who applauded the Recovery Act award as “deliver[ing] the world” to South Dakotans. As we posed for the requisite shovel-wielding photo op, I joked that the brand new directional boring machine that would soon begin laying fiber beneath the parking lot would be more fun to operate than the shovels in our hands. (Hey, I got a few courtesy laughs.)

The project will be implemented by SDN Communications – a consortium of 17 separate local and regional South Dakota phone companies that will contribute $5 million in matching funds. All of the local companies had representatives who couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about the opportunity to extend broadband services throughout their cities and towns. After the groundbreaking, I conducted a site visit to learn more about how the project is operating and to meet people who are charged with making it a success. As part of my visit, a couple of SDN’s network engineers gave me a tour of the Rapid City fiber route and showed me many of the anchor institutions that will get connected.