By Megan Wehring
HAYS COUNTY — Hays County is following suit with other counties and cities across the U.S. in improving broadband connectivity.
On Feb. 15, the Hays County Commissioners Court listened to a presentation from Connected Nation, Inc. regarding broadband mapping. St. David’s Foundation has entered into a contract with Connected Nation to conduct a connected community engagement to provide targeted data collection and analysis of broadband and technology access.
There are two different types of broadband. Fixed or terrestrial is designed for permanent stationary use at a home, business or institution that includes cable, fiber and fixed wireless. Mobile is wireless internet services designed for continuous use on a portable device.
“What we do want to recognize now is satellite services,” said Pam Waggoner, Broadband Solutions manager. “Satellite used to not be so recognized because of latency issues and reliability in itself. But it’s getting better and it is going to be a solution for certain areas, especially in rural Texas where we are not going to be able to get fiber or cable.”
Waggoner added that they are going to be looking at three core components: access, adoption and use.
“It really doesn’t matter if we adopt, or if we have use, if we don’t actually have the infrastructure on the ground,” Waggoner explained. “On the same importance is adoption. Adoption is the actual subscriptions to your internet companies for your service. Providers can lay all of the infrastructure you want, but if nobody is adopting that, then that’s a waste of money.”
Learning from the pandemic, having accessible internet access has improved the quality of life and become a necessity for many, especially students and healthcare workers.
The community engagement program needs to be diversified, Waggoner explained.
“We don’t just need people who have the internet who live around Texas State University to fill out this survey,” Waggoner said, “because it’s easy for them [since] they are comfortable with the internet. We have to reach out into our most rural areas that may not have internet, and it’s not lost on me that we are asking people who probably don’t have internet to fill out an online survey. We will provide paper surveys both in English and Spanish that can be passed out or mailed in local utility bills [or] put out in schools.”
The engagement will kick off on March 7. To learn more about Connected Nation, please visit https://connectednation.org/
