Comcast Business (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is giving Georgia's Cobb County an injection of Ethernet in a deal where Comcast will connect 34 county-run sites, including community facilities, to a mix of fiber and coax-based connections.
By working with Comcast, Cobb County said it will be able to improve online access for residents to information about its facilities and programs, ease registrations and other transactions, and provide staff with better access to various business applications.
An additional benefit of this network build is that Cobb County will be able to start offering free Wi-Fi services at its facilities. The Wi-Fi service has benefits to both residents and Cobb county staff: residents can stay connected during community events, such as baseball or soccer tournaments, and the staff will be more mobile.
As Georgia's fourth most populous county with 700,000 residents, what drove Cobb to work with Comcast is that it needed faster connections to better respond to the community's service needs.
A number of Cobb County's staff reported slow network performance when conducting transactions with residents, while the internal time management software and registration system did not function adequately. At the same time, the county could not implement new services, such as upgrading the phone system with Voice Over IP (VoIP) or providing Wi-Fi access, without a faster network.
For its network deployment, Cobb County replaced its legacy 128 kilobits per second (Kbps) DSL lines with 8 Mbps Ethernet virtual private lines over hybrid fiber/coax from Comcast to each of its 34 locations.
Cobb County also selected a fiber-based 100 Mbps Ethernet dedicated Internet service to its data center, which houses a majority of Cobb County's business applications, including its courts case management, tax, finance, asset management, human resources, and parks registration systems, as well as email and the VoIP phone system.
Ed Biggs, division manager, Technical Operations/GIS Division, Cobb County Information Services Department, said in a release that they are already seeing benefits from the new network.
"We are not only able to expand our offerings for residents and improve their experience, but our staff can perform their jobs better using a high-performance network," Biggs said.
For more:
- see the release
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