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Major findings from the Broadband Feasibility Study: • The study demonstrates demand for high-speed internet. • The study demonstrates and confirms areas with under and unserved residents. • The County desires to facilitate the expansion of broadband to under and unserved residents. • The study identified as many as 5,000 residents can be considered under and unserved residents. • The County desires to both retain and expand business and economic development opportunities. • The County desires to reduce operating cost and enhance services for its residents and businesses. Based on the results of the Feasibility Study it became clear that the current funding environment and policy emphasis presents a unique opportunity for the County to serve as a driving force to help solve the broadband connectivity needs and challenges in various parts of the County. Magellan determined several ways in which the County could help the expansion of broadband services. These range from "smart policies" to subsidizing local ISP efforts in underserved areas, to building, owning and operating its own community fiber-optic broadband network, The Indian River County Fiber Network (IRFN). "Smart policies" would encourage expansion of services by local ISP's. These would include areas like dig once, easy permitting, right of way use and sharing of assets. Subsidizing ISP's to expand and operate in underserved areas of the county mostly through joint applications of grant opportunities and co -investing and leveraging ARPA funds where appropriate. Based on this conclusion, several benefits of the network have been highlighted in the Feasibility Study and the results/recommendations will be presented to the county leadership. The goals of these tactics are to eventually provide 1 to 10 Gigabit internet service to potentially all IRC residents and businesses in an ISP Public -Private Partnership arrangement, with special emphasis on the underserved residents and businesses. For fiber customers this would be a symmetrical service which has become a necessity in today's cloud -based application environment, the fiber should also be hardened and extremely reliable as a complete underground fiber network. In the County -owned network model the network would also be a fully redundant system which does not exist today and a requirement for many businesses and all of the County's operated services. The network will have positive impacts for 7 WWW.MAGELLAN-ADVISORS.CoM 182