Boonville, AT&T partnership brings 5-Gig broadband to entire city
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Boonville and AT&T have completed a $4.4 million public-private project that has resulted in high-speed fiber broadband being made available to all of the city’s 4,000 households and businesses.
Bill Soards, president of AT&T Indiana, said the southwestern Indiana project is the first of 12 such ventures the company has planned across the state.
AT&T invested just over $3.4 million in the Boonville project, while the city added nearly $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds. Boonville Mayor Charlie Wyatt said he wanted the ARPA money to go toward something that would best serve everybody.
“I thought, having access to great fiber speeds and everything like that, that catches everybody. And the city council, they went along with it. They liked the idea, and they’re pretty proud of it, too,” said Wyatt.
‘I was looking for a partner’
Wyatt started pursuing fiber internet options for the city of Boonville when he first heard about the $39 million AT&T Fiber project in Vanderburgh County, which was completed in November 2023.
“The night that [AT&T] inked the deal in Vanderburgh County was the evening that we sat down and I got to meet Bill Soards and hear about the project, how they did it,” said Wyatt.
“[The Vanderburgh County project] received quite a bit of attention around the state,” added Soards. “And we’ve had conversations with a lot of local government leaders about, ‘How did they do that, and can we do something similar?’”
In March 2022, Boonville issued a request for proposals from private sector partners to help expand and improve access to the internet. It took a few months to evaluate all of the proposals, but in the end, the city selected AT&T to take on the project.
“I’ve got many vendors that like to be vendors to the city of Boonville, but I was looking for a partner,” said Wyatt. “[AT&T has] done work in the city of Boonville before, and that’s a big concern when you start having people come in here and going in your alleyways and possibly disrupting the other utilities that are already there.”
After AT&T was chosen as Boonville’s fiber internet partner, both parties signed a contract in July 2022 and set a timeline.
“Every Hoosier deserves access to high-speed internet,” Soards said. “We’ve been actively building fiber optics in communities around the state for the last decade. But in some areas, it’s more expensive to build. And this was a unique opportunity where we could collaborate with city leaders on a shared mission.”
Helping close the digital divide
The new fiber internet offers faster load times, multi-tasking capabilities and increased reliability to users in Boonville.
“As a fiber city, just the knowledge that every resident and business has access to up to five gigabits of speed is significant in and of itself,” Soards said.
Wyatt said everyone from residents to businesses to organizations will benefit from having AT&T Fiber throughout the city.
“I’ve had so many people that work from home anymore, from the COVID era that we’ve lived through … say, ‘Hey, I can’t wait until we get that high-speed fiber. I can’t wait. It’s going to make my life so much easier.’ And then you’ve got the ones when they’re talking about their kids and their homework. So they’re equally as excited as someone who is working from home for a business,” he said.
Soards said the advantages of fiber internet go beyond school and work responsibilities.
“[People can] improve their skills, job search, personal health, telemedicine, online health care. Or many families just will now be able to enjoy video streaming and entertainment. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities with access to this network,” he said.
Once the Boonville fiber internet project was finished in January, AT&T and Compudopt distributed free refurbished laptops to pre-selected students and families. Nearly 120 laptops have been given to residents since last summer as part of the AT&T Connected Learning initiative.
“That’s part of the educational product of this whole project, to be able to put laptops in people’s hands … we’ve targeted children, school-age kids … to help them and as well as have a little fun, too,” said Wyatt.
Boonville Now, a non-profit that promotes downtown, and Studio Bee, a community youth center, helped select the laptop recipients.
“We have access to the community, so we look at which kids have needs,” said Jim Miller, executive director of Boonville Now. “One of the requirements of AT&T was that they couldn’t already have a computer in the home. So the kids that are getting these are totally without internet or computer access.”
An estimated 1,100 students in grades K-12 in Boonville don’t have access to the internet or computers at home. Soards said access, affordability and adoption are three major components of a nationwide goal among AT&T and elected leaders to connect all Americans.
“Indiana doesn’t score very well with broadband adoption compared to some of our surrounding states. And one of the reasons for that is some families don’t have a device to be able to access the internet in their home,” he said.
Soards said AT&T is participating in Indiana’s Next Level Connections broadband grant program, seeking to partner with the state to bring fiber to more rural areas. Indiana was also awarded $868 million in Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program funds with the goal of connecting every Hoosier to the internet.
“The second half of this year, the state of Indiana will be opening grant applications to internet service providers who want to partner with local governments to bring fiber to more residents around the state,” said Soards.