Amplex expands services

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LUCKEY – Through cooperative efforts with other organizations, Mark Radabaugh, CEO of Amplex Internet, said they are continuing expansion of their fiber optic service throughout rural areas of Wood and Hancock counties.

This latest expansion comes as a result of the agreement in place with Hancock-Wood Electric Cooperative at the end of 2022 that allows Amplex to use HWE utility poles to run fiber optic cabling to thousands of rural locations in Bowling Green and south to Hancock county. Amplex Fiber crews are adding new routes every few weeks and this build-out will continue in 2023.

Radabaugh said while the majority of the expansion will be focused on HWE areas, additional service areas may be added in the future. Wood and Hancock residents who are interested can look up their address on the Amplex Fiber location map, which can be viewed on their website at amplex.net.

Radabaugh says the biggest obstacle to providing internet service in rural areas is providing a signal. The alternative is to hard-wire to each home and in sparsely-populated rural areas the cost is prohibitive.

To resolve this issue, Amplex has arranged partnerships with other organizations, offering internet service to various organizations in exchange for use of their towers to transmit the Amplex signal.

The fixed wireless technology that Amplex uses has the ability to transmit an internet signal from tower sites to the consumer sites, rather than a hard-wire connection to each home.

For example, in the past Amplex agreed to provide wireless service to the Northwestern Water and Sewer District’s computers at the water towers, pump stations and water and waste water treatment plants. In exchange, Amplex transmits their broadband signal from their towers.

Radabaugh said they continue to improve their technology.

“Fixed wireless technology has advanced enough that we can shove more data to the customers. To increase bandwidth we got fiber optics to the tower sites in order to supply enough bandwidth,” he said.

He added that due to their increase in bandwidth, Amplex is able to offer residential and business locations up to 1000Mbps.

“Thus we can far exceed any existing service that’s currently available,” Radabaugh said. “Fiber also has the benefit of providing ultra-fast upload speeds, which is very useful for photographers, video conferencing, cloud services, and any service that favors a faster upload speed.”

He said they are riding the wave of growing need for internet service in rural areas.

“Over the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people working from home and students completing schoolwork via online courses,” he said.

Radabaugh said that Amplex fiber customers are enjoying the dramatic speed difference in comparison with DSL, satellite, or even cable services.

Along with Internet service, he said Amplex also offers SFN streaming TV and whole-house Wi-Fi service that uses the latest in technology to take advantage of fiber speeds.

Amplex Internet offers local technical support from their office located in Luckey. For questions about fiber optic or another service, call 419-837-5015.

Competition with other wireless services is also a motivation for the expansion.

“Our expansion also takes us into all these small towns where Spectrum is and so it’s an opportunity to compete to get more customers,” Radabaugh said.

Amplex now has almost 90 transmission sites, extending their coverage out to Kelly’s Island, the Bass islands, Oak Harbor, Sandusky and points west and south.

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