Redwood Rural Reach: Why Your Broadband Survey Answer Matters in SoHum and Trinity County

If you live or run a business in the hills of Southern Humboldt or anywhere in Trinity County, you already know what your internet is like. What usually doesn’t exist is a record of it that a funding agency will take seriously. A new planning project is trying to build that record, and this week is the chance to get your community into it.

What was announced

On September 29, 2026, Cal Poly Humboldt and Brightscape Networks announced the Redwood Rural Reach (R3) project. It’s funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Broadband Technical Assistance (BTA) program, and the project page lists it as a $1 million USDA Rural Development grant running over 2026–2027. Brightscape is the technical lead and Cal Poly Humboldt is handling community engagement.

The goal, from the project page, is to “help communities define their broadband needs, design smart, scalable infrastructure plans, and prepare competitive applications for state and federal funding.”

R3 covers 23 communities:

The community meetings

All three meetings run 4:00–6:00 p.m.:

1. Tuesday, October 6 — Redwood Playhouse, 286 Sprowl Creek Rd., Garberville
2. Wednesday, October 7 — Willow Creek Community Service District, 135 Willow Rd., Willow Creek (open to both counties)
3. Thursday, October 8 — North Fork Grange, 131 Dutch Creek Rd., Junction City

According to the Redheaded Blackbelt announcement, there will be presentations and surveys about current service, reliability, affordability and community priorities, and Amanda Eversole from USDA’s Rural Utilities Service will talk about federal funding opportunities.

As Brian Court, Deputy CIO at Brightscape Networks, put it in the announcement: “Community participation is essential to that process.”

Why a planning grant matters

It’s easy to shrug at a planning project. Nobody is trenching fiber because of a survey. But it helps to understand where planning sits in the pipeline.

USDA describes BTA money as covering “technical assistance and training as well as feasibility studies, network designs, hiring efforts, and application development assistance.” That’s the unglamorous front end. The big construction programs, whether that’s state money through the CPUC or federal programs like USDA ReConnect, reward applicants who show up with a defined service area, a network design and evidence of need. Communities that already have that work done are in a much better position than ones starting from scratch when a funding window opens.

We have a good local example of planning turning into construction. In a September 16, 2026 article, the CPUC profiled Yurok Telecommunications Corporation (YTEL), whose CPUC-funded Last Mile Federal Funding Account fiber-to-the-home project spans 120 square miles and will serve 2,491 residents. Projects like that don’t appear out of nowhere. They start with somebody documenting the need.

Bring data, not just stories

Here’s my practical advice from the IT side: the stories matter, but numbers are what end up in a grant application. “It’s terrible” is true and useless. “Over two weeks, half of my evening tests were under 10 Mbps down and it dropped out completely four times” is something a planner can use.

What to document before or after the meeting:

• What you pay and who your provider is
• What you actually get, measured at different times of day
• Outages: when, how long, and whether weather or power was involved
• What you can’t do: telehealth visits, uploading files, running cameras to the cloud, a second person on a video call
• What you’d use if it worked: remote work, a home business, a kid’s schoolwork

A simple speed and outage logger

If you have a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop or any always-on Linux box, this little Python script will run a speed test, append the result to a CSV, and, importantly, record failed tests too. A failed test during an outage is data.

First install the command-line speed test tool:

python3 -m pip install --user speedtest-cli

Then save this as speedtest_log.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Append a speed test result (or a failure) to a CSV file."""
import csv
import json
import subprocess
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from pathlib import Path

LOG_FILE = Path.home() / "speedtest-log.csv"
FIELDS = ["timestamp_utc", "download_mbps", "upload_mbps", "ping_ms", "isp", "server", "status"]


def run_test() -> dict:
    now = datetime.now(timezone.utc).isoformat(timespec="seconds")
    try:
        result = subprocess.run(
            ["speedtest-cli", "--json", "--secure"],
            capture_output=True, text=True, timeout=180, check=True,
        )
        data = json.loads(result.stdout)
        return {
            "timestamp_utc": now,
            "download_mbps": round(data["download"] / 1_000_000, 2),
            "upload_mbps": round(data["upload"] / 1_000_000, 2),
            "ping_ms": round(data["ping"], 1),
            "isp": data.get("client", {}).get("isp", ""),
            "server": data.get("server", {}).get("sponsor", ""),
            "status": "ok",
        }
    except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError, json.JSONDecodeError, KeyError) as exc:
        return {"timestamp_utc": now, "download_mbps": "", "upload_mbps": "",
                "ping_ms": "", "isp": "", "server": "", "status": f"failed: {type(exc).__name__}"}


def main() -> None:
    row = run_test()
    new_file = not LOG_FILE.exists()
    with LOG_FILE.open("a", newline="") as fh:
        writer = csv.DictWriter(fh, fieldnames=FIELDS)
        if new_file:
            writer.writeheader()
        writer.writerow(row)
    print(row)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Schedule it with cron (crontab -e). Every three hours is a reasonable balance:

0 */3 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/pi/speedtest_log.py >/dev/null 2>&1

📝 Note: Each speed test uses real data. If you’re on a capped satellite or cellular plan, run it less often. Also, if speedtest-cli was installed with --user, cron may not find it on its PATH. Either use the full path in the script (run which speedtest-cli to find it) or add a PATH= line at the top of your crontab.

After a week or two, this gives you a quick summary to bring to a meeting or paste into a survey comment:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Summarize speedtest-log.csv against a download/upload threshold."""
import csv
from pathlib import Path
from statistics import median

LOG_FILE = Path.home() / "speedtest-log.csv"
MIN_DOWN, MIN_UP = 100.0, 20.0   # set these to whatever threshold you care about

with LOG_FILE.open() as fh:
    rows = list(csv.DictReader(fh))

ok = [r for r in rows if r["status"] == "ok"]
failed = len(rows) - len(ok)
downs = [float(r["download_mbps"]) for r in ok]
ups = [float(r["upload_mbps"]) for r in ok]
below = sum(1 for r in ok if float(r["download_mbps"]) < MIN_DOWN or float(r["upload_mbps"]) < MIN_UP)

print(f"Tests run:          {len(rows)}")
print(f"Failed (no result): {failed}")
if ok:
    print(f"Median download:    {median(downs):.1f} Mbps")
    print(f"Median upload:      {median(ups):.1f} Mbps")
    print(f"Below {MIN_DOWN:.0f}/{MIN_UP:.0f}:      {below} of {len(ok)} ({100 * below / len(ok):.0f}%)")

What local businesses should tell the surveyors

Residential needs get most of the attention in broadband planning, and they should. But if you run a business in one of these communities, your input matters too, and it’s different. From where I sit, running managed IT and security systems for businesses here, these are the things worth putting on the record:

• Upload, not just download. Cloud backup, offsite camera viewing, and sending large files all depend on upload speed, which is usually the weakest part of a rural connection.
• Reliability during the day. A card reader or point-of-sale system that drops mid-transaction costs real money.
• Whether you need a backup connection. If you’re paying for a second circuit or a cellular failover just to stay open, say so.
• What you’ve held off on. Security cameras you can’t view remotely, a phone system you couldn’t move to VoIP, staff who can’t work from home.

My take

Planning projects don’t make headlines, and the payoff is years out. But the communities on this list are exactly the places where the private market hasn’t solved the problem on its own, and showing up “grant-ready” is how you get to the front of the line when construction money is on the table.

If you’re in one of the 23 communities, go to a meeting, fill out the survey, and bring numbers. If you can’t make it, the R3 project page has contact information and will post the survey there.

Sources

• Cal Poly Humboldt, Brightscape Networks Launch ‘Redwood Rural Reach’ Project to Bring Broadband to Rural Humboldt and Trinity Counties; Community Meetings Set for Next Week — Lost Coast Outpost, September 29, 2026
• R3 Project Invites Humboldt and Trinity County Residents to Help Shape Their Communities’ Broadband Future — Redheaded Blackbelt, October 4, 2026
• Redwood Rural Reach (R3) project page — Brightscape Networks, accessed October 5, 2026
• USDA Announces $25 Million in Funding to Expand Rural High-Speed Internet Access — USDA Rural Development, June 21, 2024 (Broadband Technical Assistance program description)
• YTEL and the CPUC Work Together to Build Tribal Broadband Connectivity — California Public Utilities Commission, September 16, 2026