Written by Haley Parnell, LINK nky reporter
Working and learning from home has become the new normal, and without a good internet connection, it can be nearly impossible.
At the Dayton City Council meeting on Tuesday, Campbell County Judge/Executive Steve Pendery announced that Kenton, Boone and Campbell Counties entered a contract with Cincinnati Bell to provide Fiber Optic cables to any resident or business in Northern Kentucky that wants one.
Fiber Optics transmits more data over longer distances and faster than other mediums, making it optimal for businesses or people who work from home.
NKY residents will be a part of The Affinity Program through Cincinnati Bell. Regardless of if you have a strong internet connection now or not, the program will allow you to get more bandwidth for less money than you could without the contract between the counties and Cincinnati Bell. For example, if you want 750 megabytes of internet, you will only be charged for the current 500-megabyte rate. If you want 500 megabytes of internet, you will only be charged for 250 megabytes and so on.
Fort Thomas resident and Northern Kentucky University student Kayla Wilson will appreciate the higher speeds for her house. She has struggled to do schoolwork at home in the past, with two other sisters also using their Wi-Fi for school.
Wilson spent her first semester at NKU at home due to COVID-19.
“I had a midterm using LockDown Browser, which records you while you’re taking a test,” Wilson said. “If there are any sudden movements, any flashing lights, any background noise, anything like that will flag for cheating. Even a bad connection can flag you too. And if you get flagged more than a couple of times, you get booted out of the test. The internet started going in and out because Rudi and Maisy were also doing assignments. I ended up failing that midterm because the connection was so bad with all of us.”
Wilson said the bad internet excuse is like telling a professor your dog ate your homework. It’s not an excusable cause.
She and her family currently use Spectrum as their internet provider.
Because COVID-19 shut everything down in 2020, Wilson couldn’t go to another location to do school work. She said she has even tried to use a McDonald’s Wi-Fi connection from their parking lot before. When that didn’t work, she and her dad went to buy a router from Walmart to try and solve the issue.Â
“Upon the completion of this project, Northern Kentucky will be the largest area in the nation that has fiber to the door,” Pendery said. “This, of course, becomes something that we’re broadcasting to the rest of the world as a reason to move your business to Northern Kentucky.”
Pendery said the project should be complete within the next three years but is ahead of schedule. He said hundreds if not thousands of people who didn’t have internet connections before now have access, and people who did have access are getting stronger connections.
Wilson just purchased a house in Fort Thomas and said she is very interested in the program because access to high internet speeds is crucial for school.
“I work in technology, and I work in bandwidth,” Dayton Mayor Ben Baker said. “I understand how important it is to have high availability to everybody in this region. It’s good for jobs. It’s good for homeschooling in Dayton; that’s huge for us.”
Â
