NAPLES, Fla. – The struggle for high-speed internet in Golden Gate Estates continues.
Residents on one end of Golden Gate Estates on streets like 50th Avenue Northeast have Comcast, while the other end deals with slow speeds with CenturyLink. Now some in Southeastern Golden Gate Estates residents face the same issues.
Denise Edwards, having a child in virtual learning has been difficult.
“We don’t have any internet service,” Edwards said.
The options in her area are CenturyLink and HughesNet. She said she experimented with both. But after being unable to stream videos, and getting error message after error message, she decided on neither.
“I just opted to try and live without it or use what I could on data on my phone,” Edwards said.
This week she got her hopes up after seeing a post on Facebook from a neighbor just a few streets away.
“There was a gal that had been in touch with Comcast,” Edwards said. “who said he was in the process of working on trying to get an idea of what the need was doing kind of a survey in the area.”
A Comcast rep said that is not true. That agent was determining the eligibility of services for that neighbor, not the estates as a whole.
“If they did it on my house, why the heck wouldn’t they do it down the street?” said Comcast customer, Kenny Grau who lives on 16th Street NE.
Grau said he sympathizes with his neighbor on the other end of his street, David Palumbo who has Centurylink. Palumbo has turned to Elon Musk’s StarLink.
“I’ve already paid my $99 for the first month and it’s like 400-something dollars for the equipment too,” Palumbo said.
But that doesn’t launch until at least another few months. Meanwhile, startup, Streamline Internet launched last month. Naples resident, Lou Elliot is behind it.
“We’re leasing telecom shelter space at the base of our tower from the county itself,” Elliot said.
With only a few dozen customers so far, his plans will cost at least $200 for installation followed by a monthly fee of at least $50.
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