All 25 towns and municipalities in the district of Calw are to be supplied with a comprehensive fiber optic network. Eleven of them celebrated the start of construction in June with a joint ground-breaking ceremony today: with the construction work now underway in 13 expansion projects, a total of over 3,300 connections, including households, businesses and a hospital, will be provided with ultra-fast fiber optic Internet. The Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is supporting the project with around 17.8 million euros from the federal broadband funding program. This is in addition to the state funding and the municipal contribution.
The towns of Nagold, Haiterbach, Altensteig, Bad Herrenalb and Bad Wildbad and the municipalities of Neuweiler, Unterreichenbach, Simmersfeld and Gechingen also celebrated the joint expansion project at the symbolic ground-breaking ceremony in the municipality of Dobel.
The ceremony was attended by the mayors of the participating municipalities as well as Ministerial Director Eberhard Wurster from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Interior, Digitization and Local Authorities and District Administrator Helmut Riegger.
The large-scale expansion project is a municipal tour de force, but the newly established fiber optic infrastructure will support the digital transformation of the entire district. In order to implement the project efficiently, the district has set up the Eigenbetrieb Breitband Landkreis Calw (EBLC): It will handle the tenders and the integration of the backbone networks into the local networks for the respective municipalities. The private network operator nswNetz, in which the district has a stake, is responsible for local fiber optic expansion and operation. In this way, the district is using the operator model of the broadband funding program to expand the infrastructure of the digital future and offer it to its citizens locally.