Forestville, DC Broadband Team Up for Tower

A collaboration between the Town of Forestville and Door County Broadband led the town to sell an abandoned communication tower to the company in order to provide broadband service to an area of Forestville that had been without reliable internet service.

“Back in 1981, the Southern Door Fire Department had to put up a tower for their radio equipment. They put it up on town property, two acres the town has,” said Forestville Town Chair and county supervisor Roy Englebert. “In 2014, the county went with a single type of communication system and they put up a tower on Mill Road, so the fire department moved their equipment to that tower and abandoned the other tower in 2015.”

The fire department was supposed to take the tower down and restore the land, but Kevin Voss of Door County Broadband got wind of the tower and sent a letter to Englebert expressing interest in the tower. That got Englebert’s attention.

“We had horrible service in that corner of Forestville. Really poor,” he said. “I proceeded to investigate it and had a conversation with Kevin.”

Voss was extremely interested in the tower.

“It is a hole that we have been looking to fill,” he said of Forestville’s lack of broadband access. “When this opportunity came up to buy the tower and light it up, we took advantage. We were scouring that area for a 2017 tower build and this allowed us to do it now. It was not in our capital expenditures for this year, but we had to do it. It was an opportunity we had to take advantage of. This worked out very well.”

In fact, Voss said, as one of his employees was working on the tower, people were stopping to ask him about it.

“We had four installs scheduled for the day after we lit it up from people walking by asking, how fast can I have this? It just continues. The calls continue to come in,” he said. “We expect it to be a tower that will serve a lot of people who have no other options. That is all we’re trying to do.”

Voss said the tower went online two weeks ago and has been running on a generator since, awaiting electric installation by Wisconsin Public Service.

“We have an extended tank on our generator. It can run for four days, so we have a guy who goes down every three days and fills the tank,” Voss said.

He praised the governmental and business savvy of Englebert, who helped shepherd the permitting of the tower.

“Since it was an existing tower and the Town of Forestville applied for the permit with Door County Broadband owning the tower, the permit only cost 100 bucks,” Englebert said. “From the town standpoint, we had to keep Kevin Voss and his company interested in that tower. He didn’t drop the ball and now we have service in that corner of Forestville and we’re happy.”

Voss said the tower fits into his company’s plan for expansion in southern Door.

“We’re thrilled with it and how it lays into our network,” he said. “We will be using it as a direct feed from one of our bigger core towers, so the amount of bandwidth going through it, we can handle anything in the area. Our expansion is on schedule and we are continuing more and more our push into southern Door. Our goal is to continue to bring internet to anybody we can.”