Lone Mountain Tower receives national attention
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr climbs the 150-foot Lone Mountain Tower with Intermax Networks tower specialists Adam Clement and Jared Schexnider on Thursday. Photo courtesy of Mike Kennedy.
From left to right: Intermax Networks CEO Mike Kennedy, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, Intermax Partner Steve Meyer, Idaho Commerce Director Tom Kealey and Intermax Vice President Pat Whalen. Photo courtesy of Mike Kennedy.
Map showing tower locations facilitated through Lone Mountain Tower. Courtesy of Mike Kennedy.
North Idaho was a stop on an educational trip to discuss the ongoing work in rural communities with broadband on Thursday.
Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr, joined by state Sens. Carl Crabtree and David Nelson, both part of the broadband advisory board, as well as members of the Intermax Networks team and others, visited Lone Mountain Tower, operated by Intermax Networks.
Their mission: To learn more about the work happening in this area to get internet to rural communities.
“Idaho has a new broadband office so finding out how the state is going to work with the FCC and how they’re going to work with local companies like ours to try to expand broadband as much as possible, that was a big part of the conversation,” said Intermax Networks president and CEO Mike Kennedy. “It’s all part of a process to try to get broadband out to more people.”
The Lone Mountain Tower was a $1,508,780 project completed in December with $1,188,126 supplied from CARES Act funding and $320,654 Intermax Networks participation.
A total of 5,579 addresses receive broadband from the 150-foot tower.
“(Carr) spent about 30 minutes up in the tower looking out, talking with our team, so that he could see with his own eyes the difficulties we have in this area and how this height, the new height tower, allowed us to expand our services further out,” Kennedy said. “It was a great visit.”
Kennedy said the group discussed servicing the area with the difficulties of working around the topography problems and terrain, as well as the policies at FCC and how to best collaborate to get broadband to rural areas most successfully.
“Every state, every area has different needs, different struggles with bandwidth so this is another kind of project that (Carr) could look at and say 'here’s what they did with a very rugged terrain up in North Idaho,'” Kennedy said. “Ultimately for him, the conversation we were talking about is how much these things cost.”
Intermax Networks is working on more wireless projects in the four northern Panhandle counties.
“A lot of them are smaller than this but they are ways to get internet out to the furthest regions, the most difficult to reach places,” Kennedy said. “Our goal through these grants and through all of our work for the last 15 years is to try to build that out and get more broadband to the rural areas.”
With all the growth in Idaho, Kennedy said they have had to think creatively to service big pockets of rural areas where people are buying land and building houses.
“It’s kept us incredibly busy because there are a lot of people who are moving here,” Kennedy said. “In rural Idaho we don’t always have the infrastructure that they were used to in the bigger places that they were coming from.”
