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State gave 911 services a broadband boost

A $2.8 million project to upgrade broadband service for emergency call centers throughout the North Country, Capital Region and Mohawk Valley is complete, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday.

Essex and Franklin were among the 13 counties that benefitted from the Round II Regional Economic Development Council award, plus more than $550,000 in matching funds from the Development Authority of the North Country, which partnered with the state and local government agencies.

Franklin County

Franklin County is using the money to install broadband cables at the Tupper Lake Emergency Services Building and the Saranac Lake firehouse, county Emergency Services Coordinator Ricky Provost said Tuesday. The county’s 911 hub uses towers on those facilities to broadcast via mountaintop towers to coordinate emergency services for the whole southern half of the county.

“Eventually, when we get all of our back-room gear installed, it will act as a T1 line for me,” Provost said.

This will save money for county taxpayers. The county has broadband connections at these two sites now, for which it pays AT&T $800 to $900 a month. With the new five-year contract with DANC, the first three years are free to the county, and the last two will cost $700 in each location, Provost said.

Essex County

Essex County’s emergency services coordinator, Don Jaquish, said the DANC deal provided an important backup for its new radio system, which uses microwave frequencies. If the microwave system failed for some reason, perhaps an ice storm, the county’s emergency services could still talk to each other.

“It helped us a great deal,” he said. “We’ve become a major hub for communications for fire, police and EMS.”

DANC ran fiber-optic cable from Crown Point to the county’s microwavesite on Belfy Mountain in the town of Moriah, up to its 911 headquarters in Lewis. Add to that a backup microwave site on Wells Hill in Lewis, and Jaquish said the county has multiple layers of redundancy, which could be important.

“They did an amazing job,” Jaquish said of DANC. “We said we wanted it, and boom, a week or two later it was there.”

Regionally

The modernization effort provides 1 Gigabit service – with the potential for faster service – and connects 27 public safety locations, including 13 county 911 sites.

The network is designed to allow the addition of new sites and services to the 13-county consortium, which was originally expected to consist of six counties in the North Country – Essex, Franklin, Clinton, Hamilton, St. Lawrence and Lewis – but now includes Warren, Saratoga, Washington, Schenectady, Albany and Rensselaer in the Capital Region and Fulton in the Mohawk Valley.

“Protecting New Yorkers is our number-one priority, and when responding to an emergency, every second is crucial,” Cuomo said in a press release. “These broadband upgrades ensure that our first responders can connect, communicate and respond quickly when they are needed the most.”

In January, Cuomo launched the $500 million New NY Broadband Program, which he claims is the nation’s most ambitious plan for high-speed internet. In August, he unveiled more than $50 million in Round I awards for unserved and underserved communities across the state, and also announced that with the merger between Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, 97 percent of New Yorkers would receive high-speed broadband. The Broadband Program Office is currently soliciting Round II applications and claims it is on track to the meet the governor’s goal of broadband for all by the end of 2018.

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