Dan Dunbar, assistant county manager and chief information officer, said the effort has been an investment as a group was put together a couple of years ago to cover the county. Adopting a five-year plan back in June of 2023, getting residents access to this service is the Dunn County Broadband Task Force’s vision.
“Broadband has a lot of benefits to the individual residents within the county: it helps individuals get access to telehealth opportunities, for children in school to be able to access some of the online resources that are available through their school districts and making sure they have equity among other students that are in the class,” he said.
On top of that, Dunbar mentioned that the service has the potential to add value and desire to properties in Dunn, especially with rural housing, as it could even help with people’s careers if they need access to the internet for remote work.
Now with the awarding of a $4.6 million grant to Bloomer Telephone Co. back in December from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a $4.6 million loan, Dunn is closer to full coverage. Nearly 1,278 people, 32 businesses and 73 farms in Dunn and Chippewa County are estimated to be impacted through this grant and loan.
Dunbar said they have spent time with service providers with this work, as the service providers are the ones who will mainly operate the work to install broadband services in the county.
“As this has happened, we have been able to get many more grants awarded to Dunn County over the last couple of years,” he said. “Most recently, the one that was announced… is covering an area of Dunn County between Colfax and Elk Mound, and that is one of the areas that had been identified through our mapping process.”
Once the work is completed, only roughly two percent of county residents will not have access to broadband.
For the future, Dunbar said another potential push comes from a Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant which was applied for by Mosaic Technologies. That grant would help to address another rural area in the county: the Hay River area.
Especially as a form of broadband requires fiberoptic cables to be installed in the ground, many difficulties they face come from the work required to reach those rural areas.
“These are areas that have 40 to 50 houses that are very rural,” said Dunbar. “A lot of distance between houses and areas that may be difficult to run fiber through, whether that’s rocks or clay or rivers or whatever it is that can make it hard to run service to those areas ... it makes it very expensive for providers to get to them.”
Continuing, he also said, “The other part that we are really trying to do is advocate the advantages of broadband… Some of what we have to do is advocating to the individuals who live in that area what they can get and how this is useful to them.”
But as work is done to face those challenges and meet the needs of Dunn County residents, Dunbar said roughly only 20 locations will be left after the USDA grant and potential BEAD grant.
While Dunbar did not have an official timeline for the service providers’ installation of the service, he estimated that installation would begin once the ground warms up and the process would take one to two years.
© 2025 the Leader-Telegram (Eau Claire, Wis.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
