BPU officials recently updated the City Council on the project. Kris Sellstrom, BPU deputy general manager, presented to the council during Monday’s work session, beginning with a map of the fiber distribution service areas in the city, which he said aligns with the BPU electric service area.

Construction wise, Sellstrom said 321 poles have been set so far with the English, Allen and Newton areas he showed on the map all completed for “make ready”. “Make ready”, he said, means putting the new poles in the ground and moving up and down the existing infrastructure for the community fiber needs up and down the street. The Fluvanna area is started but has been paused for permitting and the Newland area is 70% complete. Backhaul interconnection splicing is in progress.

“The backhaul is the interconnection of all of these distribution areas to the central office equipment is also about 70% complete,” Sellstrom said.

The installation of the fiber optic cable running down the street is complete in the English area east of Foote Avenue, along with Allen and Newton areas other than the state roads there. The fiber installation in the Huxley area of the map has begun, and underground fiber installation in the English area is set to start in September, which Sellstrom said is for areas without any poles to install the fiber on, and work on getting permitting for state roads is in progress.

Pictured is the map of the BPU’s fiber distribution service areas. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

“Once you have the fiber run, and you have all of the main line fiber, you need to splice it,” Sellstrom said. “Splicing is, we take the little fibers and break them up, put them into splitters and that’s how you distribute them to the houses.”

Splicing is about 40% complete with electronics expected for the substation to come sometime during the week of the latest work session.

Sellstrom’s presentation included a map of installed poles around the city, and he followed that with a brief rundown of the BPU’s contractual agreements for the project and their current priorities. Current priorities for the project for the BPU are to continue the “make ready” work, complete the backhaul interconnections, finalize and approve the ISP tariff, agreements and rates, and launch marketing efforts. Other priorities include installing the station and central office electronics, executing a work order for drop installs from the poles to customer houses and scheduling those, installing fiber in Huxley, splicing in English, finalizing permits to the state and finishing the downtown design.

Sellstrom then went over a few aspects of what people can expect from the BPU’s Fiber project.

“Generally it’s open access, which means anyone can come and compete, any business that wants to provide internet service or other additional services,” Sellstrom said. “Once we’re through this grant period and once we’re fully established we’ll be able to open it up to additional internet service, additional service providers which should enable competition as well as economic innovation.”

Sellstrom addressed that if someone wanted to change providers through their community fiber program it would just be a click of a button to switch to whatever the customer wished. He then discussed consumers having the choice to select their ISP, the promise of a high performance, fair pricing, universal service, economic development, along with the project being community-owned and having future-ready infrastructure.

Sellstrom then touched on how to sign up for a service drop once the website for their community fiber service is launched, and the general timeline. The grant the BPU received for the project runs through December 2026, with upcoming announcements for things like the website hopefully coming soon, and marketing expected to ramp up in September. The BPU will also be looking for beta testers throughout their process as work continues, with the rest of the work expected to happen throughout the fall and downtown underground work likely happening next spring.

More information on the community fiber project can be found at the BPU’s website, jamestownbpu.com, with links to be able to access the community fiber website to sign up and more expected to come in the near future.