Charter Communications has finished a fiber build in northern Richland County that ended up reaching 1,167 serviceable addresses, well beyond the 748 addresses named in its grant agreement.
Ashley Karlen, the company's director of government affairs, reported the completion to Richland County commissioners and dated the finish to Oct. 6, 2026. Follow-up figures she supplied put the project's total footprint at 1,211 passed addresses; 44 of those are vacant or undeveloped parcels where fiber was installed so a future structure could connect right away.
What started in 2021 as an $8.1 million plan closed above $15.2 million, Karlen said. Public funding totaled roughly $4 million — $2 million from the county's American Rescue Plan Act allocation and nearly $2 million from the Ohio Residential Broadband Expansion Grant program — while Charter covered the overage with private capital, she said. She traced the higher cost to permitting delays that pushed crews from attaching to existing poles toward more expensive underground construction.
Within the original 748 contracted addresses, 720 were homes and 28 were small businesses, Karlen said; a fuller demographic breakdown of the final 1,167 is still being compiled. Extra addresses came from properties crews passed while routing toward grant-mandated targets, she said.
Reviewing the final figures, Vero calculated combined public and private spending at about $14,483 per serviceable location. County administrator Andrew Keller credited steady follow-up and communication for keeping the work on track, noting ARPA-funded projects must be finished by the end of 2026. The network offers symmetrical speeds up to 2 gigabits per second, and all 1,167 addresses are activated.