News Photo by Julie Riddle Hundreds of feet in the air, Lt. Chris Stephens of the Alpena Township Fire Department climbs a radio tower to provide internet service for rural residents.

LACHINE — It took two hours to climb 300 feet up the radio tower, but, the firefighter said, it was worth it.

Lt. Chris Stephens, an emergency medical technician and firefighter with the Alpena Township Fire Department, scaled the tower on top of Manning Hill in Lachine on Sunday, sturdy rope in tow, to hoist the four white, rectangular antennae he plans to use to provide internet to farms, hunting camps, and isolated homes in rural Northeast Michigan.

Realizing the local need for reliable, affordable internet service, Stephens did the research, made local connections, and started a one-man company, all while showing up for work at the township’s south side fire station.

Ridge Tower Network, Stephens calls his new company — so new that his only customers are prospective ones.

The antennae that will provide online connections to users in a 30-mile radius are installed, though. Licenses are in place, contracts are signed, and equipment is ready to roll as soon as the internet service provider with which he is doing business finalizes gathering permits, sometime in the next 90 days.

Stephens’ dad, Don Stephens, stood at the base of the tower as the firefighter climbed on Sunday afternoon, doling out rope and conferring with the climber by cell phone.

“He gets an idea in his head, and he’s got to go for it,” the father said, his face a mixture of worry and pride as his son clipped his safety tether to a higher tower rung several hundred feet overhead.

A few years ago, Stephens began to notice a lot of rural Northeast Michiganders were paying a lot of money for very slow internet service.

Having dabbled in part-time information technology jobs since 2003, learning on the fly from a friend, he would try to help someone with their internet, only to discover a host of weaknesses in the way it was being delivered.

“You know, I could do this better,” Stephens told himself.

Several years of research later, after asking many people knowledgeable in the field to try to talk him out of it, Stephens was climbing a tower, hundreds of feet above the treetops, to bring the internet into homes 30 miles in the hazy distance.

For the past few weeks, he’s had the best internet service in the city, Stephens said, with equipment scattered around a guest bedroom in his home so he could test to see what configurations will work best.

As service starts up in earnest and customers commit, he’ll travel the area, installing radios on rooftops and testing reception in front yards.

His service will be perfect, he hopes, for farmers wanting internet service in their milking parlor or city folks hoping to play video games at their hunting camps, or for anyone who has struggled with intermittent service that ought to be better, even in a rural area.

As interest and time permits, he hopes to expand his reach to other parts of Northeast Michigan, and perhaps even beyond. The business will eventually be self-sufficient, if all goes well, and he will be able to hire local folks to help him.

“Then, I’m going to keep doing my firefighter thing,” Stephens said.