County network brings broadband service to Westmoreland libraries

Patrons connecting to the internet at many Westmoreland County libraries may have noticed a marked improvement in download speed in recent months — and for good reason.

Beginning in July and ending this month, 16 community libraries gradually gained fiber-optic broadband service through a project initiated by the Westmoreland Library Network, under an agreement with service provider DQE Communications.

To make the upgrade feasible, the Greensburg-based network tapped the federal E-rate program, which offers discounts for internet service at eligible schools and libraries.

Executive Director Cesare Muccari hopes to obtain additional E-rate funding to provide a similar broadband boost to nine remaining libraries in outlying communities. Depending on the funding availability, he said, “we will try to implement it in a year or two. We think that having high-speed broadband is the wave of the future to do anything.”

Adams Memorial Library in Latrobe was the first location to benefit from the broadband upgrade.

“Folks are loving our Wi-Fi going through the broadband,” said Tracy Trotter, director at Adams. The library has offered a Wi-Fi connection for at least a decade, she said, but, in the past, “we used to get people who would be on it and it would drop them. The change to what we have now has been awesome.”

She recalled a comment from one patron who comes to the library for online research.

“He said, ‘It’s blazing fast. I don’t have to wait for pages to refresh.’ He was going to sites that would have taken forever to load on his unit at home.”

As of Thursday , use of Wi-Fi at the library this year totaled 903 hours — up from about 179 hours during the same period in 2019. With a download speed of up to 460 megabits per second, the improved internet service is bound to attract even more use as word spreads, Trotter said.

Ligonier Valley Library, on Jan. 9, was the last site to gain broadband service under current funding. On Monday night, the service passed its first real test with flying colors, according to library Director Janet Hudson.

“We had four things going on — a board meeting, a group in each of our community rooms and people in the building using the Wi-Fi — and it didn’t crash,” she said. “That was phenomenal. If it would have been two years ago, everything would have crashed.”

The Westmoreland network laid the groundwork for broadband service by recently rewiring all 24 county libraries for increased internet capacity, Muccari explained. That multi-year project, which included beefed-up cyber-security measures, new routers and related equipment, was supported by a $450,000 grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation and $200,000 in E-rate funding.

According to Muccari, the broadband service initiated at 16 libraries since last summer would have cost more than $1,000 per month, but the E-rate funding slashed that cost by 80% — based on free- and reduced-price lunch participation at Greensburg Salem School District, where the library network is headquartered.

The relative ease of making fiber-optic connections was a major factor in determining the libraries that were included in the initial broadband upgrade, Muccari said.

He estimated it could cost $500,000 to extend the service to the remaining county libraries, with the local share reduced to $100,000 if E-rate funding is approved.

Among the nine sites still to be connected is Scottdale Public Library, which serves a population of about 16,000 in four municipalities, where many families can’t afford internet service, library Director Patricia Miller noted. The library attracts everyone from local students completing projects with the facility’s 3-D printer to adults attending GED classes.

In addition to those who used the library’s Wi-Fi service with their own mobile devices, patrons logged on for almost 5,000 internet sessions last year in the facility’s 12-station computer lab. “That’s a lot for a small library,” Miller said.

“There are many times when we don’t’ have a free seat in the computer lab,” she said. “Its like anything else, the more that are online, the slower it can become. When people are doing something like GED testing, we don’t want them to be hindered in any way.

“Wi-Fi and internet access is vital. Anything that is going to improve that, we welcome.”