BRISTOL — Town officials are hailing the Bristol Broadband Now initiative for both bringing high-speed fiber-optic internet to the community and for potentially making Bristol the first hub in a high-tech corridor along Interstate 93 in central New Hampshire.
“Bristol will be the first and we are the first,” said Bristol Town Administrator Nik Coates on Monday in explaining that what began several years ago as a local matter — the town has poor cell coverage, he said, which it wanted to remedy – is culminating in the Bristol Broadband Now initiative and has already evolved into plans for the tech corridor.
For right now, that corridor would begin in Bristol and make its way up north to Plymouth State University, said Coates, but in the long-term, the hope is to make the corridor into a loop that also goes west on Route 25 in Plymouth then south down Route 3A, back to Bristol.
Coates and the Bristol Economic Development Committee see the Broadband Now initiative as a key and fundamental component of the corridor/loop.
Completed in December, but not yet in service, the first phase of the initiative entailed the running of a 24-mile fiber route that connected 400 residences, or about half the town, with the NetworkNH system at PSU, said Coates.
Funding was made possible by a $1.52 million Connecting New Hampshire Emergency Broadband Expansion grant through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Coates pointed out that Bristol was the only municipality in the Granite State to apply for and receives a CARES grant for telecommunications infrastructure.
By April 2021, the second and final phase of the Bristol Broadband Now initiative would see additional buildout of its “fiber backbone,” said Coates, to permit the connection of all Bristol municipal, educational and commercial buildings. Phase II is being funded by a $260,000 Northern Border Regional Commission grant, which required a town match.
Coates said Bristol Broadband Now is a public/private partnership that will be operated by an internet service provider, several of which the town is speaking with, and one of which will eventually be hired.
The initiative was born, said Coates, when the town realized that the companies then providing cell coverage would not be able to get return significant enough for their investments to improve phone and/or expand internet service.
The town recognized the need for the latter, in part, he said, because of companies like Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies, which has been “struggling” to retain younger employees.
Freudenberg also needed “to compete globally,” said Coates, and to develop a local workforce that could be trained in robotics and other applications, whether that instruction came from as near as Plymouth State or as far as Freudenberg’s headquarters in Germany.
Coates said the broadband initiative may help make Bristol “a high-tech hub in a rural community that has a lake (Newfound Lake), which we think is a winning formula.”
Plymouth State President Donald Birx, in a prepared statement, said the Bristol initiative is “an example of the substantial investment in New Hampshire’s economic future” and one that through high-speed internet technology, “is a boon for our faculty, staff, students and everyone in our community.”
