By Josh Staloch
Staff Writer
ALLOUEZ – TDS Telecom plans to bring fiber-optic lines to Allouez, the Village Board learned at its meeting last month.
The underground network of fiber optic cable will bring upload/download speeds of up to one gigabits per second to village residents, with the ability to expand as technology advances, Josh Worrell, manager of business development at TDS said.
If in 10 years the average speed of a connection is five gigabits per second, the network in Allouez will be able to handle it without further upgrades, he said.
“We’re looking to be in communities with good household growth, good household demographics,” Worrell said. “We’re going to be targeting the Greater Green Bay area. For Allouez, it will be about 67 or 68 miles of fiber, while the greater Green Bay area will take about 1,100 miles of fiber.”
He said the construction necessary to make the network will be impactful.
Worrell said there is no easy way to get 70 miles of fiber into the ground without turning a few residents’ heads.
He said residents will be notified about a week prior to construction in their area with a flyer from TDS about what to expect as the project moves through their section of the village.
The Allouez portion of the project is expected to begin in the spring of 2022 and should take 12 to 15 months to complete.
TDS expects to have the Greater Green Bay area covered within 3 to 5 years.
House relocation
With unanimous approval from the Village Board, a home and detached garage currently situated at 2354 Riverside Dr. will be relocated to 2550 S. Webster Ave.
Randy Bain, the owner of Bain’s House Moving, said the move, which will happen in the middle of the night sometime in November, is not expected to disturb any residents along its short route from Riverside to Webster.
“I’ve been in business moving houses all my life,” Bain said. “With this one, and where it’s sitting, we’ll start with the garage, should take us a day to load it. The house will be a bigger process. It will probably take us five days to get it set up and loaded, and then it will take us about three hours to get to the location.”
The owners of the two properties said they plan to sell the house once it’s relocated to Webster while building a new home for themselves on the Riverside lot.
In other business
• The Public Works Department has hired Allouez resident Shannon Shornack as its new special equipment operator. Shornack worked for the City of Green Bay, where he had experience in the collection of garbage and recyclables, leaf and brush pickup, snow plowing and asphalt patching.