If technology is how mankind reinvents itself, then ensuring communities have the latest technological improvements at their disposal is essential for growth. This is why La Porte Mayor Tom Dermody has been pleased to partner with Surf Broadband solutions to build fiber infrastructure throughout La Porte.
“It’s very important for all our residents to know our services. Whether it’s for business, personal, or schools, we want to be able to have that top-of-the-line broadband available,” said Mayor of La Porte Tom Dermody. “We want to be a gig city. We want to draw those companies here. We talk about being 30,000 residents by 2030--30 by 30. This is another step to make La Porte the place to be.”
Having a home base in La Porte, Surf Broadband leaders desired to make building fiber in La Porte a priority, and this desire increased when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The pandemic made it not only beneficial for local communities to have better broadband but essential.
“We believe that broadband is an equalizer that gives people access to the same resources as their big-city neighbors,” said Gene Crusie, CEO of Surf Broadband. “During COVID, we saw that there was definitely a need in La Porte County for better broadband to help people that needed to work from home and students that needed to do eLearning but didn’t have that ability. That’s what inspired us to take action.”
Surf Broadband approached Dermody and La Porte Economic Advancement Partnership (LEAP) about the idea of creating a gig city, and both entities quickly hopped on board.
“With this particular project, it kind of all started when Gene Crusie and his team saw the potential to grow La Porte into a gig city, and they really outlined how that would happen and what the city would need to do in partnership with Surf Broadband to get to that end goal,” said LEAP Executive Director Bert Cook. “The city was thrilled to have the opportunity, especially to do it with a hometown company; a company that we trust. We jumped right on board, and we’ve been working with them for a while now on the project.”
One of Surf Broadband’s early projects in La Porte was connecting city departments which were all on separate connections, leading to inefficiencies in both ease of use and cost. Surf Broadband engineered a system that increased connectivity within the city.
“We get better service, faster service, more reliable service, and it’s cheaper. That city department project, to me, cemented how valuable their service can be to our community,” Cook said.
In La Porte, Surf Broadband is offering one gig upload and one gig download for $65 a month. This level of capacity was something that only commercial customers could afford. When this kind of capacity is available to personal residences through fiber, housing prices increase by 3-5%. To put this capacity into perspective, Chief Technical Officer Patrick Wheeland uses a Netflix analogy.
“I always like to use a Netflix analogy where Netflix needs five megabits for the HD movie to stream. So, when we give you 1000 megabits per second, you can stream 200 HD movies at the same time,” Wheeland said. “The capacity we’re providing is just really phenomenal. It’s anything you could possibly need to do in your home that you can do with our internet connection.”
The south phase of the gig city project is coming to a close, so Surf Broadband is beginning to branch out into other areas. The company is about to break ground over the east side of La Porte and is looking into building the north part. With active construction passing over 100 homes and several thousand more that are in design, Surf Broadband is maintaining a great pace in making La Porte a gig city.
“La Porte is part of a fiber network that connects the biggest data center in the world in Chicago to data centers in South Bend and throughout Northern Indiana, so companies will have access to whatever resources are available to the largest companies in the world through the data centers in Chicago,” Crusie said. “In essence, fiber is unlimited. We can offer any capacity to a business in La Porte or in the case a business has multiple facilities inside the city or across the Region, we can interconnect those locations with basically unlimited capacity.”
Although La Porte has been its main focus, Surf Broadband Community Liaison Bill Haughee said Surf Broadband is not stopping there.
“Stay tuned because La Porte was the appetizer if you will; one of our home base areas. We do a ton of work in Elkhart and Goshen where we have another home office. We’re really working in some very underserved areas now.”
To learn more about Surf Broadband Solutions, visit https://www.surfbroadband.com/
