Pandemic highlights broadband gaps in Adirondacks
Where corporations fall short, neighbors and smaller companies have gotten inventive
Tim Rowland Adirondack Explorer
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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.