The county is 90 percent rural with about 78,000 residents spread over 922 square miles. It’s a lot of territory, and most people live in unincorporated areas. Decatur is the county seat.
“It’s not dense housing,” Clark told Governing.* “The fiber model and math don’t make sense for us yet.”
Wise County had $1.3 million in ARPA money for broadband.
For counties near metropolitan areas, broadband is essential for attracting remote workers. Wise County is adjacent to Denton and Tarrant counties, Tarrant being home to Fort Worth. Essentially, many travel to them for work, entertainment and other activities.
There hasn’t been much of a business incentive for providers to take on the cost of bringing fiber-optic cable to a limited customer base, but it is one of the priorities for ARPA’s broadband funding.
Clark was co-chair of a broadband task force convened by the National Association of Counties (NACo) when it released a report on best practices and policy recommendations in 2021. It included both wireless and wired technology in its definition of digital telecommunications infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Hudson Oaks-based Internet service provider Nextlink had licenses to use a portion of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) radio spectrum and a technology partner that had developed a way to use CBRS to deliver wireless broadband service, comparable to cable.
Technically speaking, CBRS is unlicensed spectrum — a 150 MHz wide broadcast band of the 3.5 GHz band — that can be leveraged for private 5G or private LTE networks. The high-frequency radio spectrum with range and the ability to convey large amounts of data at high speed.
Military users have priority access to it, but in 2020 the FCC auctioned licenses on a county-by-county basis. Nextlink secured one for Wise County.
Nextlink’s tech partner is Tarana, which had developed technology using the model employed by cellphone networks to deliver wireless service at speeds comparable to those achieved using cable.
Investing a total of $2.6 million, they built infrastructure that provides service at download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second — the FCC’s current definition of “broadband” — to more than 99% of the county. The buildout took seven months.
The project has been “transformational” for households and businesses in the county, Clark said.
“We’ve got a lot of young families that are moving into Wise County,” Clark said. “If this creates an opportunity for them to do more work locally, without getting on the highway and driving to Fort Worth or Dallas, that’s a win for them and a win for the community.”
The county’s infrastructure upgrade wasn’t entirely wireless. It included a fiber loop that brought gigabit service to 20 county buildings. That is being extended to neighborhoods and business corridors.
“We learned a lot and have a lot of lessons to share with other communities that are looking for some of the same options,” he says.
CBRS isn’t a cure-all. Dense foliage and mountains have interfered with coverage in some places, but it has created possibilities for rural areas that didn’t exist before.
“I would encourage county leaders to be flexible and reach out and ask about other technologies,” Clark said. “Fiber is great where you have the ability to do it, but in a lot of our more far-flung and rural counties it’s just not really feasible. There are other things out there that can get some great speeds.”
The full version of this story originally appeared in Governing, a sister publication of Industry Insider — Texas.
