Cyber Broadcasting Utilizes Mapping Data to Expand, Serve Housing Authorities

Roxana Ryan
Published: December 6, 2012
Related to: Chicagoland eTeam, Northeast Central eTeam

Cesare Bratta is the President of Cyber Broadcasting, LLC, based out of Coal City. He frequently attends eTeam meetings in the Northwest and North Central regions and has even utilized Broadband Illinois speed-tier maps to expand his coverage area. 

Tell us about your work with housing authorities and the Connected Living digital literacy project for senior citizens:

The project started with the housing authority in Grundy County. We heard the residents were having difficulty getting reliable, affordable internet, television and telephone services and wanted to help.  We ended up partnering with Connected Living, an organization that provides digital literacy training to senior citizens in public housing, and now we are providing great rates on triple-play services to residents in Kankakee, DeKalb, and Henry counties. We expanded by calling many other housing authorities in the region to try to get better services to those residents as well. It’s been a big expansion for us and we’ve doubled in size in the past two years and hired more full-time and part-time employees. Our goal (among many others) is to provide fast, affordable internet service to any housing authority in the top half of Illinois.

Attending Broadband Illinois’ eTeam meetings helped me to find out about what’s going on in other counties and where there might be opportunities. For example, I met with folks from the Illinois Century Network (ICN) and iFiber and would like to find a way to work with them to get service to some other remote areas of our region.

What other services does Cyber Broadcasting provide?

Our core business is in rural areas of Northern Illinois and we have a footprint throughout 8 counties. We typically focused only on providing internet, dish network, and digital phone for residences and had never considered expanding to a multi-dwelling unit like the housing authorities. Our success comes from keeping an open mind about what services users may need. We consider ourselves a “solutions company.” Some housing authorities and local police departments needed better security systems and surveillance equipment and we were able to provide that as well.  We’ve built “mini” wireless networks for farmers, public parks, and others who want to monitor their property to deter crime.

Where are you expanding and building new infrastructure?

I attended eTeam meetings in the Northwest and North Central regions to meet more people. Clayton Black, an eTeam coordinator, showed me a regional speed-tier map and I noticed a few areas were “red” and we would be able to serve. We saw the opportunity to build towers in these areas and get high-speed, fixed wireless service to these residents. Our newest tower in Cullom (population 563) will be lit up by Christmas!

We’re also looking to expand services to rural schools who have unreliable or no high-speed internet. I want to talk with some of the middle-mile fiber projects that are in construction to see how we could work together to get access for these schools.