Lampasas: Area business speaks out against city feasibility study

The city of Lampasas continues to take in suggestions on what kind of internet service people want in their homes or businesses.

It all started with an major power outage in 2017.

"Folks will probably remember in the summer of 2017 we had four to five outages where basically our town was shutdown. Banks had to close their doors, people couldn’t take credit card payments and phones were not working. At that point we felt the city had to step up and at least do an assessment of what we could potentially do" Lampasas city manager, Finley deGraffenried said.

News of the shutdown spread quickly, reaching businesses like local internet service provider Hyper Fusion Technologies.

"We want to see the area grow. So it was our plan to hit those businesses first get the critical infrastructure in place the schools, 911 system things that the city infrastructure needs" Hyper Fusion Technologies manager Christopher Seykora said.

Seykora says he and others reached out to the city to let them know they could provide them with internet service and were disappointed to hear the city was doing a feasibility study.

"They're conducting a survey so we are taking information from everybody which we have submitted and again a second time and still nothing" Seykora said.

The city say they cannot select a company or companies without the results of the survey.

"The city does not want to be discriminatory in terms of who could provide those services however we want to make sure that regardless of where you live or how large business is you still have the same opportunity to get that size of broadband" deGraffenried said.

Seykora says any concerns the city may have about their services is fixed.

"I understand the city had some concerns about the early deployment of hyper fusion but we have since corrected all of that" Seykora said.

The city extended their survey deadline to February 2019