By GLENN WOJCIAK

The Post staff writer

Plans to build a long-anticipated fiber optic network to serve Medina County passed a critical juncture with the announcement of the sale in $14.4 in municipal bonds to finance the project.

Bethany Dentler, executive director of the Medina County Economic Development Corporation, said Dec. 17 that a bond consultant had just completed sale of the bonds at an average interest rate of 5.96 percent. Cash from the bond sale was expected to be in the hands of the Medina County Port Authority by the end of the year and a fiber lighting ceremony to kickoff the construction phase of the project is planned for March or April.

Dentler said the port authority, which will own the network, plans to pay off the bonds over the next 20 years with fees charged to customers of the fiber network.

OneCommunity, the non-profit communications company that will build the network, has predicted it will take 18 months to complete work on the project. However, Dentler said some customers may be able to connect to the network much sooner.

The network will be built in five phases and will be able to serve customers as soon as the phase serving their area is completed.

"Customers won't get the full redundancy the system will offer until the network is completed, but they will be able to connect and begin using the system as soon as it reaches them," Dentler said.

The network will consist of 151 miles of fiber intended to bring enhanced and low cost communication capability to commercial and institutional customers.

The first phase of the network will extend from a OneCommunity Hub in Parma down Ridge Road to state Route 303 where it will turn west, loop through the Brunswick Industrial Park, then continue west to Marks Road and another industrial park there.

The second phase will extend the fiber optic cables south along state Route 94 to Wadsworth and also split off to the east along state Route 18 to a second OneCommunity Hub in Akron.

The third phase of construction will extend the network from the Marks Road Industrial Park, through Valley City and down state Routes 252 and 57 to Medina. At the same time, the network will be extended from Wadsworth to Lodi along either Seville or Greenwich roads.

Next, the network will be extended along state Route 18 from Medina to where the network crosses state Route 94.

Finally, the network will connect Lodi to Medina with a line of cable along U.S. Route 42 and include an extension down Lake Road to the Medina County University Center in Lafayette Township.

Work on the network should be further accelerated by the fact that OneCommunity began preliminary work in the fall.

"They've already walked the route and began scouting utility poles and places the cable will go underground," Dentler said.

Financing for the project was helped by $1.4 million in federal stimulus funds. That money was part of a total $45 million grant received by OneCommunity to extend fiber optic cable across 20 Ohio counties.

Jim Gerspacher, co-chairman of a committee which has been working to build the fiber optic network for nearly 10 years, sees it as a valuable economic development tool. He said earlier this year the network could be a powerful tool to attract new high tech businesses to the county, retain existing businesses and prompt some of them to expand.

Gerspacher also said the primary reason for building the network is to reduce the cost of Internet service. He said the average price of a megabit of capacity is $35 in the United States. He said the cost in Japan is only 90 cents.