Broadband access in area to be discussed at summit

Local leaders and residents are invited to attend a broadband summit Thursday evening to discuss service availability across the county.

The meeting, to be held from 5 to 6:30 p.m., at Forrest City City Hall, will be led by Bill Coleman, a consultant with the Benton Institute for Broadband.

Coleman encourages anyone with concerns about high-speed Internet and broadband issues to attend the meeting.

“Everyone is welcome to participate in this meeting,” said Coleman.

“I will facilitate the meeting and hopefully get people to talk about how good they think current services are and if those services are reliable. We’ll also talk about areas that are currently not being served. Some places have broadband, but it’s not to the standard it needs to be,” said Coleman. “Where they live may not have broadband or sufficient broadband to do their work because their Internet connection is inadequate and we want to hear from them.

“We’re working across Arkansas right now and just finishing up a project in four different communities,” continued Coleman. “We were working in Hughes, but it turned out to be a little too much for a small town, so we’re trying to make this more of a county-wide effort.”

Coleman said information will be shared during the meeting on the current and future broadband funding opportunities through the state.

“This meeting is really to look at broadband maps and talk about the state financing program to see if local leaders, such as mayors, city officials, school officials and others want to work together on this program since there are a lot of areas where there is not broadband service,” said Coleman.

“We’re trying to understand better what is in place now and decide if it’s a priority area for community leaders or if this is good enough,” said Coleman. “If everyone is satisfied with the

(Continued from Page 1) way things are, that will be fine. If they see a need for better broadband, we can provide an organizing group to make that happen. Hopefully, we’ll hear from some people and get a feel for what the situation really is,” said Coleman.