Over the past year, several Internet service providers have asked the county for support letters to pursue stimulus funds to expand broadband service into the county’s unserved, and underserved, areas, Logsdon explained, noting that such areas exist in every supervisorial district in the county.
She said the California Public Utilities Commission initiated the California Emerging Technology Fund, which Lake County has participated with for the last few years in a rural consortia to expand high speed Internet.
The CASF was established with $100 million in December 2007, and provides up to a 40 percent match for the total project cost for broadband projects, leaving the business to come up with the other 60 percent, she said.
In rural areas like Lake County, expanding Internet service can be “exorbitantly expensive,” Logsdon said. That’s despite the fact that high speed fiber has been installed in many areas of Lake County and Northern California.