An Archtop Fiber vehicle is seen in this photo taken on Friday, March 8, 2024. (Tania Barricklo/Daily Freeman)
Rhinebeck, N.Y. – Town Board members have agreed to amend an inter-municipal agreement with village officials that allows internet service to be changed from spectrum to archtop fiber.
An amendment outlining the expected costs negotiated through the village was approved at Monday’s Town Board meeting.
“They already have a base in the east part of the village,” Mayor Gary Bassett said. “Fiber installation should begin in earnest in April, with a goal of completion in late May.”
The installation of fiber optic lines in most parts of the village is carried out through small ditches in the streets. However, aerial lines will be installed along East Market Street, an extension of State Route 308, as archtop fiber is prohibited from entering state highways.
“We were able to put up poles on East Market Street,” Bassett said.
The town and village have a shared computer system with a server at Village Hall and a line to City Hall, about 85 feet away, just across Center Street.
Mr Bassett said the main selling point of the municipality’s move to Archtop Fiber was the guarantee of symmetrical internet speeds, with both uploads and downloads running at 1 gigabit per second, with the potential for up to 10Gbps. . He said the village currently has only Spectrum’s service, which provides 500 megabits per second of downloads, with plans the company estimates upload speeds at about 20 Mbps.
“The police have their own internet connection on Spectrum, and in the future the village and the police will be connected to the same internet provider,” he said.
“Today’s data upload requirements take many hours a day with current service providers,” Bassett said. “As you move to higher bandwidths, like 1 gig, this amount decreases significantly.”
They are also more confident that Archtop can maintain service even if lines in remote parts of the system go down due to inclement weather.
“They offer a closed-loop system with failover in each direction,” Bassett says. “So…there are no endpoints, and Spectrum doesn’t provide endpoints, so that should improve reliability. An outage like this could result in service interruptions here in Rhinebeck.”
Bassett said the contract for Archtop Fiber services will not be approved until the company is ready to connect.
The total annual cost for this service would be $23,328, a 35% increase from $5,900. The cost split will change based on the addition of village police to the system, reducing the town’s share from 72% to 57% of the cost. Calculations are based on the number of workstations required to use the system. servers and firewalls.
