Close to Finishing Construction in Escalante, Half of Customers Now Installed
Kanab, Utah – South Central Communications (SCC) has been making significant progress on the state-of-the-art Fiber network in Escalante. This new 100% fiber optic network will provide exponentially greater bandwidth to every home, business, school, library and government building in Escalante.
Construction crews broke ground in Phase 1 earlier this summer and are now moving to the final portion, Phase 5, which comprises a couple miles of HWY 12 west of the city. With a majority of construction completed, installation crews have been moving swiftly to connect customers to the new network. These technicians are finishing work in Phase 2, the southern core of the city, and will be moving to the outer portions in the coming weeks. They expect to have everyone in Escalante using the new fiber network by the end of January 2018.
Fiber’s more robust bandwidth capacity will allow SCC MyFi fiber customers to access Internet speeds as much as 200 times faster. The need for increased bandwidth has swelled recently with the increase of internet-connected devices in the home and growth of streaming video consumption. According to South Central Communications CEO Michael East, “The number of devices inside the home has increased dramatically over the past two years. That trend is only going to continue as technology advances. At SCC, we have not only built a fiber network that is capable of handling today’s Internet demand, but for decades into the future. In our fiber areas, SCC’s speed packages have increased from a maximum of 50 Mbps (Megabits per second) to 1,000 Mbps (equal to 1 Gigabit per second).” In the future, when SCC customers find themselves needing Internet speeds above 1 Gbps, it won’t be a problem for the fiber network. “All it will require is a small change to some internal SCC electronics and the problem is solved.”
East concluded, “We are thrilled to be bringing this fiber network to Escalante. Personally, I am excited by the tremendous, and much needed, opportunities it will provide. Not the ability to stream and watch multiple Netflix movies at a time – sure you can do that – but rather it’s the educational opportunities and improvements in healthcare that are available via the tele-health that will be a real benefit this this community.” Also included in all the benefits are the hundreds, if not thousands of home-based jobs that are available by virtue of access to an enhanced Gigabit-capable network.
Once fiber construction is complete in Escalante, focus for SCC in Garfield County will turn to Tropic and Cannonville. Crews are slated to break ground in Tropic in January 2018. In addition, SCC will be ramping up fiber construction in more areas starting in 2018. Concurrent projects will also being next month in Apple Valley and Enterprise, Utah. Customers in Loa and Panguitch can expect to begin seeing activity in their area sometime during the spring of 2018.
For more information about the fiber project, please contact Ebbi Hafen or SCC at (888) 826-4211.
