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PITTSTON TWP. – Every building and yet-to-be-developed site in CenterPoint Commerce & Trade Park now has access to Comcast’s high-speed Internet services.
In announcing the service Thursday during a press conference at the Junior Achievement building off Oak Street, Gerald Chiampi, president of the Greater Pittston Chamber of Commerce, noted that in a recent survey of business leaders, “availability of advanced telecommunication infrastructure” was ranked fifth most important among 35 site selection factors.
“That rating makes our announcement even more important,” Chiampi said.
The high-speed data and digital phone services “can be functioning almost immediately,” said Dave Dombroski, vice president of Comcast Business’s Freedom Region, which includes eastern Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area.
Dombroski said Comcast would absorb all the costs on installing the infrastructure, which he said exceeded seven figures. He declined to be more specific.
In the past, new customers would have been asked to pay the cost to run a line from the nearest service point. While not guaranteed any new customers, he said the company had picked up five.
The project was sitting in a file when Dombroski moved into his present job in June 2014.
“It was a very vague plan,” he said, which Comcast had pitched to Mericle but done nothing on it since. Seeing the potential, he contacted CenterPoint developer Rob Mericle to get the ball rolling.
Comcast had previously had no service to the park, which also is served by Verizon, Level 3 and Frontier, said Jim Cummings, a Mericle spokesman. The difference with Comcast is the speed of installation, he said.
“It fits the whole Ready-To-Go program,” in which Mericle has prepared sites available and can complete a building in nine months or less, Cummings said.
Cabling goes up to existing buildings, Dombroski said, and “our fiber is sitting in vaults at the pad sites.”
Services include high-speed Internet, Ethernet, digital voice and PBX telephone, and cable television.
Also on Thursday, Lew Sebia, chief operating officer of Mericle Commercial Real Estate Services, said construction had begun on a 400,000-square-foot speculative industrial building, the 39th in the park. Another 45 sites remain, 23 of them in the Ready-To-Go program.