SARANAC LAKE North Country Community College President Joe Keegan invited a slew of local and regional politicians to the Saranac Lake campus on Wednesd
Pandemic highlights broadband gaps in Adirondacks
Where corporations fall short, neighbors and smaller companies have gotten inventive
Tim Rowland Adirondack Explorer
FacebookTwitterEmail
Janelle Schwartz works at Craigardan, an Elizabethtown-area nonprofit where employees must ration their use of satellite internet. (Mike Lynch/Adirondack Explorer)Adirondack Explorer
ESSEX COUNTY To Mike Hopmeier, it felt like an old-time country barn-raising.
Hopmeier is president of a northern Virginia counterterrorism consulting firm who turned a Cold War thermonuclear missile site in the Adirondacks into a research laboratory. Not surprisingly, Hopmeier needed bandwidth, and lots of it.
But when Spectrum checked out his location on a lonely road south of the mountain called Poke-O-Moonshine, the company gave him an estimate of $50,000 to a lay a half-mile of fiber to his lab. Hopmeier figured there had to be a better way.