“Create a county-wide fiber optic network that connects every person, family, visitor, business, and farm with the opportunities provided by affordable and reliable high-speed internet.”

-Schuyler County’s Broadband Vision

Schuyler County-Population Statistics

The city of Rushville has fiberoptic internet. However, Rushville holds only 37.5% of the total Schuyler County population. Based on Maps and Survey Data, we see that 2/3 of the Schuyler County population isn’t being served with adequate Internet.

In the state of Illinois, Schuyler County is ranked 90/102 in terms of population. The county is also ranked 100/102 in population density.

Our Goals…

Goal 1- Continued Communication

  • Continue the work of the Broadband Committee, meet monthly

  • Regular updates to social media and news outlets

  • Presentations to City and County Officials

  • Regular meetings with local, state, and federal legislators

Goal 3- Information Gathering

  • Continue to gather data with Broadband Survey

  • Explore Feasibility Study for CapX of fiber buildout for Schuyler County

  • Explore utilization of Hunting Lodges as community centers

  • Parcel the County into Zones for Phased Expansion

Goal 5- Build Digital Equity plan

  • Utilize Broadband Breakthrough Survey Results

  • Encourage community interaction with IOB surveys and digital equity information

  • Narrow down the barriers to adequate internet use in Schuyler County

  • Determine thresholds of affordability and device use

  • Increase utilization of ACP

Goal 2- ISP coordination

  • Share Presentation, Maps, and Survey Information with ISPs

  • Regular Meetings and Check-ins

Goal 4- Engage Agriculture

  • 54 contacts that could be personally engaged on the topic of easements, right of ways, and vertical assets and the ag community’s role in affordable/feasible broadband infrastructure for the county

  • Continue discussion of and substantiation of yield benefits of high speed, reliable broadband

310 unique Responses (5% of the population)

Broadband Survey Findings

97%

took the survey for their Home.

Fixed internet

33%

Support their business functions

35%

Supports precision ag

28%

Supports family Life

62% say they are unsatisfied with the affordability of their network

59% say they are unsatisfied in the Speed of the Internet they have.

86%

Need to connect 5 or More Devices to their local Internet connection

Farm/Agriculture Satisfaction

96%

needed to Resort to Cellular Data for Internet

cellular Internet

54%

Support their business functions

67%

Supports precision ag

47%

Supports family Life

Areas that were Unsatisfied

55% say they are unsatisfied with Reliability of their Internet

Survey Comments

  • “My farm which is 3 miles north of Rushville has no access to high speed. With the growing demand of

devices needing access to the internet it is definitely a disadvantage of having my shop outside of

town. I farm various farms throughout the county where I barely have enough signal on my phone to

make calls. We live in an age that agriculture and other various businesses are on the cutting edge of

implementing technology for applications in our sectors where we will not have the infrastructure to

handle it moving forward.”

  • “Schuyler County needs more rural internet especially when rural school kids have a snow day from

school and have homework assigned to them that makes hard for them to do since some have little

to no internet. Also, Schuyler/Rushville needs to have choices of more internet providers to have

competitive pricing.”

  • “We've had Starlink satellite internet for about a year. They just raised the price again to $120/mo.

During the day I typically get around 100mbps down and 10-15mbps up. Evenings are slower with

more traffic. We have a 1 TB data cap and once crossed we'd be deprioritized after other traffic. We

haven't been using more than around 500GB/mo though. I am afraid the price will keep rising but we

have no other options other than back to cellular hotspots.”