Lyndon Township is addressing internet outage issues with ARPA funds

Lyndon Township is putting the funds it received through the American Rescue Plan Act to good use.

A big chunk of it is helping Lyndon continue its work in helping residents get access to reliable high-speed internet. Lyndon Township is using just over $290,000 on a fiber optic cable. These were federal funds provided to municipalities by the government.

Lyndon Township Supervisor Pam Byrnes said some of the funds were designated toward building a redundant fiber optic cable that is capable to back up internet service. Byrnes said the township was happy to use these funds on a project that should benefit most of the township. There are just under 1,000 subscribers in the township network, which was created after township voters approved the ballot measure to help pay to build a fiber optic network reaching all households in Lyndon.

In answering some questions about the use of the ARPA funds, Lyndon’s Broadband committee representative and Deputy Supervisor Gary Munce told the Sun Times News there has been some confusion regarding how the Lyndon network operates. He said Lyndon Township owns about 68 miles of fiber optic cables that run along the roads within the Township - all of these lines are buried and protected from adverse weather and other hazards.

“The fiber network in Lyndon is connected to the broader internet through a fiber optic cable that runs from the township border to the east towards Ann Arbor,” Munce explained. “These cables are owned and operated by third parties and contracted for our use. These cables are mostly aerial (run along utility poles). This ‘middle mile’ connection is where any outages that have affected our network have occurred, on aerial fiber owned by a third party.”

He further said, “As we have discovered, having only one fiber line connecting us to the broader internet is a problem that has resulted in some outages. It is important to note that every township-wide unplanned outage we have experienced has been due to an outage of this third party fiber line - the network within the township has never had an unplanned outage. To prevent outages in the future, the township has built a second external fiber line to provide a backup in the case that our primary external fiber line fails. This project has been underway for over a year, and we are in the final phase of bringing this connection on line. This link includes buried fiber cable running from the edge of the township to a third party connection just south of Chelsea which then continues to the West. This redundant fiber path was completely funded with American Rescue Plan Act funds.”

When this new connection is in place, Munce said a failure of “our primary connection would cause an automatic immediate failover to this backup connection, avoiding any outage.”