Another 413 homes in small, desert communities in Riverside County are getting high speed, fiber to the home service, via the Anza Electric Cooperative and a grant from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). The California Public Utilities Communities approved a $1.8 million subsidy – $4,300 per home, amounting to 70% of the total cost – extending an earlier CASF-funded FTTH project that reached 3,750 customers in the co-op’s core service area in the Anza Valley.
The new build covers the Pinyon community and the Santa Rosa Reservation, but it skips over Mountain Center and Garner Valley, because Frontier Communications upgraded its service in the area. It’s receiving federal money to deliver broadband service at 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds, and was able to demonstrate that its VDSL upgrade was delivering around 20 Mbps down/2 Mbps up, at least to some homes. That’s on the low end of what VDSL technology is capable of delivering, but it’s more than enough to make Mountain Center and Garner Valley ineligible for California subsidies.
In the communities that are eligible, Frontier relies on 1990s style DSL technology which generally runs at about 2 Mbps down and less than 1 Mbps up, where it’s available at all. It told the CPUC it wouldn’t make any more service without CASF subsidies of its own. Which it won’t get because Anza Electric Co-op moved faster.
People in communities to the east and west, though, are – or soon will be – getting access to symmetrical speeds of up to 1 Gbps. The co-op’s flagship consumer package is symmetrical 50 Mbps speeds for $49 per month, with a $25 per month, 10 Mbps down and up offer to low income households. There’s no commitment or bundling required for either package (although an unlimited domestic phone line can be had for another $20 per month).