A new broadband grant will bring high-speed internet to the Sanderstown area, connecting 411 locations.
The announcement came Friday, March 14, during a broadband town hall at Holly Springs Baptist Church by N.C. Department of Information Technology (NCDIT) Secretary and State Chief Information Officer Teena Piccione. (See coverage from that meeting in the March 26 edition of The Franklin Press.)
Piccione announced three Completing Access to Broadband (CAB) grants at the event. One was for Cherokee County with Peachtree Broadband Fiber for 749 locations, Clay County with Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation for 1,602 locations and Macon County with Frontier Communications of the Carolinas for 411 locations.
The trio of projects will be funded by more than $7.5 million from the federal American Rescue Plan and nearly $2.6 million from selected broadband providers. Roughly $3.4 million of these funds will be for the Macon County/Frontier project.
Jeff Lee of Little T Broadband, which provides broadband consulting to the county, said the 411 locations are in the Sanderstown area, along U.S. 441/Sylva Road toward Cowee Mountain.
“We had prioritized areas where we wanted to see the next grant money applied,” Lee said. “This was one of our priorities since there had been no grant money pushed in that direction.”
Of the 411 locations, 37 are businesses, Lee said, noting they plan to deploy the grant and have work begin by the end of 2026.
While the legal agreement gets finalized between NCDIT and Frontier, work delayed by Hurricane Helene is set to start.
Lee said Frontier is working in the northern part of the county and that its primary contractor has staged equipment near Coweeta Church Road for broadband work in the second half of this year.
A Balsam West project in south Macon County has been delayed by permitting but is otherwise ready to start.
“Helene slowed down a lot of these things,” Lee said. “Resources to prepare the poles has been scarce.”
The grant for the Sanderstown area is the latest in a series of broadband infrastructure grants Macon County has received. However, the vehicle for these grants, the American Rescue Plan, will soon end. Lee said possibly the last chance to apply for these funds is upcoming in the Stop-Gap Solutions program, another broadband infrastructure program for unserved or underserved areas.