Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Yet another technology company has made a sales pitch to the Jefferson County Commission, this one a company that specializes in innovative devices to bring connectivity to remote rural areas.
Commissioner Betsy Barfield invited Tekniam reps to make a presentation to the Jefferson County Commission meeting on Thursday evening, Sept. 15, offering the company’s technology as a possible means to bring connectivity to District 5. Barfield said she had come upon the company while researching ways to address the lack of connectivity in certain areas of the county.
“The commission has been struggling with a way to have connectivity in District 5, and this company has an interesting concept,” Barfield said, adding that she had asked it to focus on the communities of Waukeenah, Wacissa and Lamont.
Making the presentation were Tekniam Chief Operations Officer Timothy Stranahan and CEO Andrew Heaton, Stranahan appearing in person and Heaton making a brief appearance via Zoom from Colorado.
As the two explained it, theirs was a new company founded specifically to provide connectivity to the most remote places in the world, starting with an Indian tribe in Venezuela. The company had then quickly expanded its focus into children’s education, telemedicine and rural communities.
“To be very clear, we’re not a Internet Service Provider (ISP),” Stranahan said. “We’re not going to flick a switch and magically bring you broadband. What we do have is a device that can take a satellite or cellular signal and send it 1,000 feet in each direction. Moreover, we can take that signal and move it from point A to B to C to D. And everyone within 1,000 feet of each one of our antennas can have access, up to 250 people per antenna.”
Their system, Stranahan said, consisted of three main components. He called the first a remote universal communications system (RUCS), which he described as the overarching product.
The middle component, he said, was the portable communications link (PCL), which took in signals from existing satellite, Ethernet, broadband or cellular networks and expanded the signals via distribution modules, i.e., antennas, to push them far out into other areas.
Stranahan, in fact, had set up a PCL in the hallway outside the commission chamber to demonstrate the ease of the setup and the capability of the system.
“What we can do is we can connect to a satellite, cellular or fiber signal,” Stranahan said. “Here in this community, we can connect this signal to fiber and extend that signal out as far as the fiber will carry us.”
He related an experiment that he had conducted in Waukeenah a little earlier to test the system’s capability on location.
“I connected to a Verizon signal and was able to pull in only 10 megabits per second,” Stranahan said. “But for that community, we can connect to a Starlink or HughesNet (satellite providers) and we can take those satellite signals and the 10 megabits from Verizon, bond the two, and send that out to the community. That’s how we provide Wi-Fi to the community for Internet.”
He talked of creating a mesh network by placing multiple antennas within an area that could then “talk” to one another. The cellular or satellite signal, he said, could then be pushed through the various antennas and distributed farther and farther out.
“So that everyone is getting a piece,” he said.
Stranahan said the system’s capability was unlimited, in terms of what it could push out.
“We can connect 250 people on each of our distribution modules,” he said. “So if we have four of those, we can connect a 1,000 people. We’re not limited by our system. Whatever we push into it, we can distribute. If there is 5G in the area, we can deliver that. We would have to find technology to grab it here, send it to Waukeenah, pick it up there and distribute it. But those technologies exist. The more backhaul we can push into the system, the more we can deliver to the community.”
For a community the size of Wacissa, the cost of the system’s installation would be between $700,000 and $900,000, he said. But this was one-of-a-kind technology for communities such as Waukeenah that were starved for connectivity, he said. Plus, he said, the cost paled in comparison with putting in fiber, which cost would be “out the roof.”
The system required no digging or trenching for installation, Stranahan said. It could be put up relatively easy and fast. His company would then manage the network for the first three years and the county would own it afterwards. The county too would decide if it wanted to monetize the service or offer it free.
He emphasized also that theirs was not a substitute for broadband. If the county could get broadband, by all means it should get it, he said. Theirs was for areas where broadband was not feasible to install, he said.
The thing to keep in mind, Stranahan said, was that the more backhaul was put into the system, in terms of cellular or satellite signals, the greater the cost, as these signals would have to be purchased from Verizon, Starlink or whatever the provider.
Should the county decide to proceed with the system, he said the next step would be to have Tekniam engineers do a formal site survey of the targeted communities to get more detailed information. The money for the project, he said, could come the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), of which the county is supposed to get more than $2 million.
The way it was left, Commissioner Stephen Walker, who represents District 5, was to get with Stranahan one-on-one and discussed the project’s potential in more detail.