Warren County Fiscal Court has received seven preliminary proposals from companies interested in cooperating with the county to improve broadband connections outside Bowling Green.

Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon said the proposals have come from groups including Bowling Green Municipal Utilities, Warren Rural Electric Cooperative Corp. and MacQuarie Group Limited, which is currently involved in the Next Generation-Kentucky Information Highway, an open-access broadband network that is supposed to make high-speed internet connections readily available across the state.  

“I’m very encouraged by the level of interest from all these companies,” he said.   

Brian Mefford, CEO of Connected Nation Exchange, a company working with fiscal court on the project, said the responses are not firm proposals of how the groups would pursue the project.

“It’s just more how they would approach a project like this and the experience they have with other projects,” he said.   

Though he hasn’t examined all the responses in detail yet, each one seems to be leaning toward offering to engage in a public-private partnership with the county, he said.

A public-private partnership is an agreement between a private company and a public institution that allows companies to expand into new areas that might not otherwise be lucrative enough for them, like a rural part of a county, Mefford said. 

“Effectively, the public-private partnership approach achieves the benefits for the public and shares the risks,” he said.

“It’s clear that the companies went to great lengths and a big effort to put the responses together,” he said. “It demonstrates that there’s a strong interest in Warren County as a broadband marketplace.”

David Wiles, who moved to Warren County in June, said via email that the high-speed internet he enjoyed at his previous home in rural Pulaski County far exceeds what’s available in much of Warren County.

“Much to our dismay, we find the options for high speed internet range from bad to (non)existent,” he said in the email. 

The 10 megabits per second broadband connection he had in Pulaski County was more than enough to meet his needs, Wiles said in a phone interview. “I had a little farm way out in the boonies but we had it,” he said.

When he moved to Warren County, Wiles contacted numerous internet providers, including Time Warner Cable, Dish Network and AT&T to see if he could get a fast internet connection for his new home, less than a mile west of the Allen County line, and was dismayed to learn the best deal he could get was a 1.5-megabit connection, Wiles said.  

“You can’t do anything with 1.5 megabits,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe that there was no other option.”

Buchanon said he routinely receives calls about the need for more expansive broadband in the county. 

“Mr. Wiles would not be an uncommon call that I get,” he said. 

Connected Nation Exchange will review the responses in the next few weeks and report back to the fiscal court so the court can decide what to do next, he said.  

 “We’re in the infancy of putting all this together,” Buchanon said. “We’re at the point where we’ll soon be seeing results.”  

— Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.