After an airport committee meeting held on Tuesday, the Mid-Delta Regional Airport is one step closer to the enhancement of its network infrastructure and internet access.
The committee, which includes Mayor Errick Simmons, Councilwoman Lurann Thomas-Kingdom and Councilman Vernon Greenlee, voted to send the recommendation of entering into contract with C Spire to provide those enhancements to the full Greenville City Council for consideration.
C Spire quoted a price of $1,115 per month for the service.
The council is expected to render a decision on the matter at their next regular meeting scheduled for 4 p.m. Tuesday.
Initially, airport director Sam Washington was partial to utilizing the services of AT&T for the necessary upgrades and enhancements.
However, further discussions with C Spire — the other service provider that was being considered — and AT&T led Washington and IT experts to lean more towards C Spire primarily because the company holds the cloud contract with the State of Mississippi and its much shorter turnaround time for installation than originally proposed.
C Spire representatives assured the committee installation would take no more than 45 days.
At the last regular council meeting, airport director Sam Washington requested the council’s approval of updating network lines and internet access to Airport Hangar 450 and the terminal.
The city’s IT director, Keith Gann, affirmed how imperative the forthcoming upgrades are, especially with the city and airport in pursuit of a successful Hangar 450 project with Greenville Kearns Aerospace Maintenance (GKAM).
“We want to try and get the whole airport on the same level so that once the project gets going, if we have an outage in any one place, we can just go to another location and we’ll be able to keep going until we get that problem solved,” Washington explained.
“This is to get the service to run through the building and to a router in the building. For the terminal we’re already there, but what this will do is run the service to each hangar.”
The upgrades will also include an increase in bandwidth so features such as security cameras won’t result in an “overload” of technology in terms of data.
