Specifications include, but are not limited to: Mason County is soliciting proposals from qualified contractors for the design and construction of county owned infrastructure and operation of the resulting broadband network that will provide affordable, equitable, high- speed broadband access to all residents, businesses, and anchor institutions in all areas of Mason County, Michigan. The qualified contractor must be able to assist the County in grant applications to secure federal funding for the portions of the county considered to be unserved addresses and underserved addresses. Per the Federal Communications Commission, unserved addresses are defined as having less than 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload, and underserved addresses are defined as having between 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload and 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. The County strongly prefers investments in network infrastructure that can deliver at least 100 Mbps download speeds, ideally with symmetrical upload speeds, from wireline technology with capacity to scale to multi-gigabit services.
