Results of internet speed test are in

By Carmen Ensinger

The results are in from the Better Internet for Greene County Project that urged Greene County residents to take a speed test on their computer devices earlier this year to show that the county is in need of a faster, more reliable internet service – namely broadband.
The project was looking to get at least 10 percent of the county’s population to participate. The county has a total population of 13,886 residents in 6,389 households. There were 667 test locations with 1077 total tests representing 10.4 percent of the county.
The project was funded by a $15,000 Connect Illinois grant awarded to the City of Carrollton last year as part of the Connect Illinois Broadband Grant Program, which represents an integral and strategic component of both the comprehensive 2019 Rebuild Illinois infrastructure program and the state’s five-year economic plan to expand economic opportunity and reduce socioeconomic gaps through equity investment.
The grant allowed the city of Carrollton to hire a consultant to look at the internet service in Carrollton but they decided to go a step farther and include the entire county.
“We knew we had a lot of residents who live outside of the city in rural areas as well as in other towns in Greene County who have little or no service at all,” Carrollton Treasurer Diane Hendricks said. “So, the Greene County Economic Development Group came on board and funded the study for the rest of the county to be included in the study.”
The city hired GEO Partners from Burnsville, Minn. as the consultant to analyze the information gathered. All of the information from the speed test was uploaded to their servers and from this information, a map was created showing the exact location where each test was taken in addition to the speed at that location.
The survey found that there are basically two internet providers in the area – Sparklight and Frontier– and, for rural customers, Illinois Electric Coop is the primary provider.
One of the more interesting questions asked how satisfied the customers were with their current internet service. A total of 679 households answered this question. Of those, 8.69 percent were very satisfied while 6.33 percent were very dissatisfied. Those who ranked their feelings on the service as neutral were 34.46 percent while those satisfied came in at 27.98 percent and those dissatisfied came in at 22.53 percent.
The reason for their dissatisfaction was another eyeopener. Of those households, 207 listed the speed as the major reason for dissatisfaction, followed by 170 households who are not satisfied with the reliability and 99 listed cost as their reason for dissatisfaction.
Other reasons for dissatisfaction included: customer service issues, data caps and running out of data and a lack of ISP choice.
As for the speed that Greene County customers have, over 68 percent of internet customers have less than a 25 megabyte per second (mbps) download speed and over 54 percent have less than a 5 mbps upload speed. Over 4 percent of the county’s residents have no service at all and 50 percent of these residents say it is because it is too expensive.
Frontier was awarded the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) to bring the internet to rural areas of Greene County. The RDOF was an FCC initiative that began in 2020 designed to inject billions of dollars into the construction and operation of rural broadband networks.
RDOF will provide $20.4 billion in funding over a 10-year period to support broadband networks in rural communities across the country. Funding for RDOF comes from traditional high-cost universal service funding and is not dependent on legislative appropriations.
One key finding from the report was that Wisper Internet received funding from the Connect America Fund (CAF) several years ago, but didn’t provide any service to the rural areas with these funds. However, by receiving these funds, no future projects can be funded with federal or state funds since they were funded earlier with federal funds.
With Wisper receiving money from the (CAF) to deploy into some areas of Greene County, this might block funding for those areas in the future.
For now, they plan to complete the design study with GeoPartners, LLC and identify providers that will partner for future grant funding to expand and improve broadband service and apply for grant funding while exploring interim solutions that can provide service sooner.