Volo aiming to get high-speed internet to all of rural Champaign County over next 5 years
CHAMPAIGN - Over the next five years, it should get quite a bit easier to get connected in rural Champaign County.
A $48.4 million initiative, supported by American Rescue Plan Act funds, is getting underway to bring broadband internet access to areas of the county that don't consistently have it.
The main obstacle to the effort thus far? Getting in touch with landowners.
Peter Folk, CEO of Volo Internet + Tech, said that unexpected delays from the process of negotiating easements to be allowed to run fiber through people's property have set the project back by nearly a year.
"Once we're able to talk to people, for the most part, we've been able to find a mutually agreeable process forward," he said. "But a lot of people, there's just no way to find them."
Volo applied first through the Champaign County Board, then through the state, to take this project on.
State law requires those easement agreements for any property the fiber lines pass through, but the process of figuring out who owns any given piece of farmland isn't straightforward.
Folk encouraged anyone who lives up in the northwest quadrant of the county to contact the company online or by phone and get everything straightened out, if they can.
"Giving us a call is really the thing that will allow the project to keep moving forward," he said.
Folk, alongside Bailey Conrady of the Champaign County Farm Bureau, referred to internet expansion to rural areas a "rural electrification for the 21st century."
"Just as electricity moved from being a luxury to being an absolute necessity, high-speed internet has become essential infrastructure for agriculture, businesses, schools, healthcare and for families," Conrady said.
She highlighted advancing tech and focus on data in modern agriculture, and Folk pointed out how family members of farmers might still have other jobs or school to participate in from home.
Especially post-pandemic, many workplaces and schools expect online video-call participation during work-from-home days or similar scenarios.
Volo will be working to run 584 miles of fiber internet around the county, aiming to provide to thousands of homes, farms and businesses that are currently not covered by any other high-speed internet service.
They are also hosting neighborhood events to get the public familiar with the project, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. July 14 at the Community Sports Complex in St. Joseph, on Aug. 11 at East Side Park in Tolono and on Sept. 8 at the Lake of the Woods Lakeside Shelter in Mahomet.
Folk said that while he himself has never dealt with being in too rural an area to have broadband access, getting internet out to the public has been his mission for a long time.
He decided to open Volo in the late 1990s - because the business he had wanted to start was an internet cafe.
"I could not buy internet as a small business for less than about $1,200," Folk said. "As a home at that time, you could buy a home internet service that was about 5 megabits and it was about $40, but if you were a business, they would not sell it to you."
With that kind of overhead, he couldn't make his internet-cafe dreams come true, but he was inspired to work to make internet more accessible a different way.
"When we then started offering services, rural people were clamoring for it, and they were our primary customer base for the first 10 years of our company," Folk said.
This project comes as a major boost to Volo's ability to provide to that customer base.
Folk said "true broadband" runs at least 100 megabits, the minimum required to have current interaction with modern technology.
That's what Volo will be bringing to parts of the county where properties are too sparse to even form towns or villages.
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