Specifications include, but are not limited to: This shared service partnership seeks to provide a middle-mile infrastructure ring throughout two counties in southern New Jersey: Cumberland County and Salem County. Throughout these counties, there are substantial swaths of the region featuring underserved and unserved residents living with incredibly slow internet access or with no Broadband access at all. As with many unserved or underserved populations, these pockets tend to be somewhat sparsely populated with high levels of low- or moderate-income residents. This project will advance both of the Middle Mile Grant program’s key objectives. By creating four interlocking rings through the unserved and underserved areas in the two-county region, the project will “encourage the expansion and extension of middle mile infrastructure to reduce the cost of connecting unserved and underserved areas to the backbone of the internet.” In addition, this new network has been designed by one of the top engineers in the field with an eye toward resiliency and will be installed professionally, and connects to two first-mile internet connections – one in Philadelphia and one in Delaware – providing redundant service. Built-in laterals and redundant node points further increase these redundancies, ensuring that, should outages happen, they will be minimized in scope. Further, the project engineers are building climate resilience into the design, and node points in existing structures are climate resistant. As such, this project is expected to “promote broadband connection resiliency through the creation of alternative network connection paths that can be designed to prevent single points of failure on a broadband network.”
