Ritter Communications announced the company is investing $7 million to bring high speed internet to the city of Hot Springs. This announcement took place Friday morning at the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce.
“In June 2017 we had a collective community meeting with both our partnership and checking reports of directors. When you live in a wonderful place like Hot Springs, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the exciting things,” Gary Troutman, Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce President said. “We have Oaklawn, one of the finest race tracks in America, Bathhouse Row, three beautiful lakes, a national park, a vibrant downtown and some of the very best schools in the state.”
Troutman said that in the 2017 meeting they discussed the community’s lack of decent broadband connectivity.
“We’re grateful to be here with you to announce a new network infrastructure project for the spa city business community,” Alan Morse, President of Ritter Communications said. “We’re an Arkansas company headquartered in Jonesboro. We are proud to say we’re the largest locally owned, regional fiber Telecom video and cloud service provider in the state of Arkansas.”
Morse explained how Ritter has already impacted cities Arkansas in the last few years.
“Our focus has been to help rural communities grow and prosper by providing the same state of the art services that normally you can only get in major urban areas,” Morse said. “Over the past several years, we’ve expanded our network to offer those services in places like Batesville, Mountain Home, Searcy, (and) Russellville.”
Congressman Bruce Westerman was invited to speak but was called in for a mandatory vote in Washington D.C. However, he was able to make a video on behalf of the announcement.
“Thank you to the Hot Springs Chamber, business leaders there in Hot Springs and to Ritter Communication for doing this very important project,” Westeman said. “This is something that we need to see all over the Fourth District. Most people probably thought that Hot Springs already had all of the high speed broadband capacity that they need, but we know that’s just not true.”
Westerman said in the video that the problem becomes very pronounced in more rural areas in the district and the satellite connectivity that is currently available is expensive and slow.
“Folks, the playing field just got level. We are open for business and one of the drawbacks are our community is now been resolved,” Hot Springs Mayor Pat McCabe said. “Now we’re on the world stage to compete with all other communities within our region and nationally for business.”
Mayor McCabe continued to say high speed broadband connectivity is now a common utility that the in the community was greatly lacking.
“I look forward to their moving into our area. Being a family owned business based in Arkansas, they understand or our unique community and are ready and willing to bring Hot Springs the communications package that will provide much needed infrastructure improvements to assist us in our move forward together,” Garland County Judge Darryl Mahoney said. “They want to be part of our continued effort to bring better opportunities for business, education and our general public that will further enhance our quality of life here.”
Ben Van Wagner, Director of IT at Oaklawn Jockey Club was the last speaker for the event, being one of the key figures in the community improvement.
“We found a lot of the nonprofits and educational institutions were actually paying a lot more for less. So we started with education and we wanted everybody to understand exactly what broadband was versus just regular internet or high speed,” Wagner said. “We figured the only way to really solve this was to be increased competition among providers and we needed companies competing on service, speed, reliability, and price.”
Ritter Communications plans to have their highest speed, 100 percent fiber internet, voice, cloud solutions, networking and television services up and ready for use by the end of summer 2019.
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