The Rochester City School District has a bold plan to connect every house in the city to the Internet. Residents would not have to pay to access the high speed broadband network.

“Approximately 50 percent of our students have internet access at home and that’s not enough,” said RCSD Information Technology Officer Annmarie Lehner. “Unless all of our students have that same level of access, it’s not equitable.”

High school student Joshua Carson, 18, can’t afford Internet at home and goes to the library for computer time.

“It’s not a lot of money, but when you have other bills it creeps up,” he said.

Kevin Santiago has to choose between a cell phone or home Internet. He chose a cell phone, even though he can’t do much web surfing. Census data shows 13 percent of Rochester residents can only access high speed Internet on their phones.

“You would have to pay a lot of times at least $60 dollars to get unlimited high speed internet on your cell phone,” Santiago said.

Lehner has been working for months on ways to get all students access Internet at home to do research projects, homework stored in the cloud. Even web surfing about topics of internet can expand students’ knowledge.

The district did a feasibility study to see what would work to achieve this goal. Lehner thought a citywide Wi-Fi network would be the result.

“We started calling this our citywide Wi-Fi project, but we soon realized that’s one technology. We really need to look at all the technologies that are out there,” Lehner said. “Cost is a factor. Reliability is a factor. When we looked at Wi-Fi, reliability was an issue.”

The study recommended a more radical approach.

“If we want to build a reliable network, we really have to go with the latest technology, which is fiber to the home,” said Lehner.

Fiber lines offer internet at vastly greater speeds than cable lines or phone lines. It turns out the city, county and school district each has an extensive fiber network with a lot of excess capacity. But it’s expensive to build out the so-called “last mile,” the connection to the home or office.

How expensive?

The district’s study found it would cost $90 million to connect 90,000 homes in the city to the fiber network. The district expects the private vendor selected to build the network would absorb some of the cost. The district plans to use $6 million from the Smart Schools Bond Act that was approved by voters. The district also hopes to get an undisclosed amount of funding from the governor’s broadband initiative. It submitted an application last week. If the district gets the grant, the deadline to finish the project is the end of 2018.

The district is partnering with the city on the project. Both entities would also likely have to contribute to the network.

Residents would not have to pay for 10 to 15 megabits per second service. That’s the same speed Time Warner Cable offers in its standard package. Higher speeds would cost money. Residents would be offered tiers, with 1 gigabit service costing the most.

In Rochester right now, Greenlight Technologies is offering up to 1G service to homes, but it cannot expand into neighborhoods without critical mass of subscribers. Greenlight has previously told News 8 it would be interested in accessing the city and county fiber network to expand its business.

Businesses would be able to tap the new fiber network, but they would have to pay for the connection and pay a monthly fee. Gigabit service is very attractive to many tech firms.

When David Moffitt of Grid Marketing was searching for new office space, fiber Internet was a must. Many offices around town didn’t have the infrastructure.

“My business would not be where it is in downtown Rochester if it was not for fiber Internet,” he said. “I said look if we can’t have fiber, I don’t want to move there.”

Moffitt believes this proposed fiber network could be like Google Fiber, and attracted businesses and residents to the city.