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Patrick County approves Brightspeed BEAD support after residents complain of outages
Summary
The Patrick County Board of Supervisors voted to approve a letter of support for Brightspeed’s BEAD broadband grant application after residents described recurring telephone and Internet outages and the company outlined plans to replace copper with fiber and interim fixed-wireless service.
The Patrick County Board of Supervisors voted to approve a letter of support for Brightspeed’s application to the federal BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) program after an extended public-comment period in which multiple residents described recurring landline and Internet outages.
The decision matters because Brightspeed told the board it would seek BEAD funds to build fiber to roughly 3,000 addresses in the county and to offer a 2-gigabit symmetrical service at a proposed $99 monthly price; company representatives said the project would cover 621 BEAD-eligible locations and that Brightspeed would fund buildout for an additional roughly 2,320 addresses not eligible for BEAD. Several residents said current copper infrastructure fails to meet basic safety needs, including emergency-calling reliability.
Public commenters described repeated, lengthy outages on landline service that in one…
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