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MANTUA, Box Elder County — Residents of Box Elder County will get faster internet speeds in the near future, as part of a grant to help strengthen connectivity around the state.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Box Elder County will get $5.8 million of Utah's $10 million Broadband Access Grant with the goal of bringing high-speed fiber optics to rural areas of the state. Cox, members of the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity and local leaders were in Mantua Thursday, to announce the grant for the northern Utah county.
When he worked in the telecommunications industry, Cox said he was responsible for getting broadband fiber optics to Utah's rural communities. He was surprised to learn that now, even the remote communities of western Box Elder County will be able to get access to broadband internet.
"Even I didn't think Grouse Creek was going to get broadband this quickly," Cox said during a news conference at Sydney's Restaurant. "So when I heard this morning that they had managed to get broadband out to Grouse Creek and some of those places, I was really shocked and I'm so excited for Mantua."
Box Elder County Commissioner Stan Summers said the grant is a culmination of hard work, and communities like Snowville, Park Valley and Howell are among the more remote communities that have high speed fiber.
As he held a letter from the 1930s, Summers said that his grandfather helped establish water rights in the county, in part due to grant funds. He said that he lives in a place where his grandfather helped give the community water, and he hoped that his grandchildren can look back and live in rural Utah, in part, due to this sort of broadband access.
"If we want to continue this down that road, you've got to think ahead like my grandpa did back in 1937 and realize that this is the start of something huge," Summers said.
In addition to announcing the grant funds for northern Utah, Cox again reminded Utahns to go to speedtest.utah.gov to self-report their internet speed, as part of a state campaign to map areas with slow or no internet connection in the state.
The self-reported data will be used as a guide for future projects that would make high-speed internet more readily available around the Beehive State. Data collected from the survey will include location, internet speed and monthly internet cost, according to the Utah Broadband Center and the Governor's Office for Economic Opportunity. The data collected is secure and the results will be anonymous.
The speed test can be conducted online in English or Spanish. For areas with no internet connectivity, you can still report by calling 1-435-777-TEST (8378).
There's no limit to the number of times someone can complete the speed test. Cox encouraged Utahns on Thursday to do the test multiple times at different times in the day, as more tests would create a more thorough mapping of available internet speeds.
