BUFFALO (WBEN) - On Tuesday, Greenlight Networks, a fiber-to-home internet provider in New York State, announced a community partnership with 716 Ministries, its first community partner in Buffalo.
Construction of Greenlight's network is underway in the city's West Side and Elmwood Village neighborhoods, as residents in these areas now have the ability to place pre-orders for high-speed service.
In the image above, areas highlighted in bright green are currently open for pre-orders, whereas the darker green areas are expected to be ready later this year.
"While our field techs and engineers were designing the network over the past several months, we met with community leaders and elected officials to learn more about the region," began CEO Mark Murphy. "The message we kept hearing was how important it was for the community to benefit from Greenlight's expansion to the region."
Greenlight expects its service to be available to roughly 10,000 households across the region by the end of 2021, and they will begin accepting pre-orders in additional areas of the city in the coming months.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz applauded the efforts of Greenlight, saying more competition will help drive down costs and increase service possibilities for city and county residents.
Poloncarz also reiterated the county's Erie Net plan, which is an initiative he announced back in 2019. Essentially, the goal of Erie Net is for county government to lay the ground work for a 360-mile countywide, open access fiber broadband service that would help bring high-speed internet to even more of the underserved areas of the county.
"Entities that are interested in investing in our community, they will not go to a community, a neighborhood, where they cannot get access to high speed fiber - it's as simple as that," said Poloncarz. "That, unfortunately, will shut out tremendous amounts of communities, not just in the City of Buffalo, but in our rural areas, because if they don't have access to high speed fiber, if it's not available for a business to hook into, they're not going to move their business there."
The county recently re-issued the RFP for a design consultant to help figure out how best to lay out the system to work with utility companies in terms of access to poles.
"Right now, we're evaluating that - we have an evaluation team, which is looking at all the responses to determine which is the best one for us to go forward," Poloncarz began. "We'll be announcing the choice of the party that we will be partnering with very soon, and of course, because it's a contract, the contract would have to go over to the Erie County Legislature for approval, and then they start the work."
