Rural businesses find other ways to get reliable internet
A three-minute drive used to be all the difference between good and bad internet service for one Eau Claire business owner.
Tanner Schnur, owner of Piney Hollow Wood Craft, said his business’s current internet provider is CenturyLink, which works well for him considering his workshop is located right next to a service hub, but not too long ago, he’d take a short drive north to his house to find his access to service would drop drastically.
At his nearby home, CenturyLink’s service wasn’t sufficient, he said.
“It took days to download anything,” Schnur recalled.
About a year ago, he gained better service when switching to T-Mobile’s 5G plan with a mobile hot spot for home internet, but soon he and other business owners in the Moniteau and Slippery Rock school districts hope service will be more accessible to northern Butler County.
Earlier this month, Armstrong Telecommunications announced it has received about $12.47 million in Broadband Infrastructure Program grants for two projects that will widely expand broadband access.
According to Butler County Commissioner Leslie Osche, who assisted in the grant application, the projects will aim to fill internet gaps experienced in the Slippery Rock and Moniteau school districts.
“It will be 200 miles of fiber, connecting 1,555 units, which are either businesses or homes between both projects,” Osche said.
And while a start date on the projects has yet to be determined, the project’s potential has people like Schnur and Cory Stuchal, owner of Stuchal Farms near Slippery Rock, hopeful for the future of internet options in their respective communities.
Stuchal said his internet service used to be hit or miss, but a few months ago he switched over to Davis Security Systems out of Greenville, Mercer County, and now his download speeds are much faster.
Having quality internet for Stuchal is crucial, he said, because a lot of his tractors and farm equipment run on GPS technology.
“You will get every inch of the fields covered, and you don’t have to worry about waste by overlapping with fertilizer,” Stuchal said. “It also provides product shut-off, which also helps with not overlapping when you come back to an area you've already covered.”
Stuchal said his equipment has been using Trimble and Precision Planting software since 2010.
“Locally, I would guess about half the farms have some sort of GPS technology,” Stuchal said. “Most of the larger farms will have it.”
Before switching to T-Mobile, Schnur said he brought up the issue with service to CenturyLink for years. Sometimes, he said the company would send a technician out to assess the problem, but the fixes were only temporary at best.
“They would come out, and they would splice some wires,” Schnur said. “It would work for a little bit, and then it would cut out again.
Anytime it rained the internet would cut in and out.
“It made me think that water was getting into the lines somehow, but we don’t have that problem anymore,” he said.
Schnur said internet at his business, which specializes in custom wood European plaque pedestals for deer mounts, is a must. The business uses a computer-aided machine to cut plaques, some in the shape of U.S. states.
The vast majority of his orders are not local, but all over the country, which is another reason why reliable internet is crucial, helping him to send and receive product orders and communicate with his customers.
For years, Schnur said he was waiting for Armstrong to expand its service into his area, which never came, even after they paid a visit to his property.
“About three years ago, they came out and were kind of scouting it out,” Schnur said. “They said they had future plans to come through this area, and we were excited because, at the time, T-Mobile didn't have their thing, and our only option was satellite internet or CenturyLink.”
Tricia Niederriter, owner of Oneida Valley Grocery said her business has also had mixed results with CenturyLink, particularly with their security cameras.
“We have CenturyLink, and our security cameras run on Wi-Fi,” Niederriter said. “The only problem we seem to have with our internet is that parts of our building have a weak signal because it’s a metal building.”
Security footage then gets uploaded to a server and is automatically deleted after a few months, she said.
Oneida Valley Grocery’s lottery machine also runs off its own Wi-Fi system, which Niederriter said runs through AT&T. Its service tends to work on and off as well, she said.
According to Ryan Davis, owner of Davis Security Systems, his company now offers what he calls Davis Rural Broadband, which utilizes a customer’s closest cellphone tower to bring high speed internet to those in rural areas such as Slippery Rock.
“We install our own outdoor antenna kits which allows us to link them up to towers that are miles away,” Davis said. “It’s as fast as cable internet. We have data plans with all the carriers. We can make it work basically everywhere.”
Davis said his business originally began as a security systems company, but when he branched out to into rural areas, he quickly realized this customer base didn’t have strong enough internet to support the systems, thus he created Davis Rural Broadband.
Even with Armstrong planning to expand its service into these rural Butler County areas and in surrounding counties, Davis said he is still confident his smaller company will continue to have a strong customer base.
“We had a lot of customers that are not happy with those bigger companies,” Davis said.
As the project gets underway, it’s not immediately clear if Schnur, Stuchal or Niederriter will benefit at all. The region for the project has been identified as within the Slippery Rock and Moniteau school districts, but no further information has been released on the project’s whereabouts.
