by Taylor Dobbs vtdigger.orgOn June 12, Governor Peter Shumlin celebrated a broadband expansion to 4,000 new potential customers in central Vermont.But what about the 20,000 still unserved locations? After Shumlinâ s 2010 campaign promise of universal broadband by the end of 2013, service providers are down to the wire.
From left: Karen Marshall, chief of ConnectVT; Chris Campbell, executive director of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority; and Gov. Peter Shumlin. VTD photo/Taylor Dobbs
Karen Marshall, chief of Connect VT, is the administrationâ s number one in telecom. She is at the â nexus of everything,’she said ‘all current and proposed projects, all funding sources private and public, all service providers. Marshall sits at her desk on the Fifth Floor of the Pavilion Building on State Street, ignoring the view of Montpelier as she focuses alternately on multi-colored maps of the state and extracting data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on her screen.
Behind the door of her office looms a full-sized poster of broadband coverage in Vermont as of June 2010. Itâ s a constant reminder of Marshallâ s deadline, but also of the progress already made.
The 4,000 connections came from Cloud Alliance and a $240,000 grant from the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, of which Marshall is a board member. The VTA is responsible for providing the public funding that will help get Vermont to its goal. With $10 million over two years allotted to the authority in last yearâ s capital bill, the quasi-governmental body has limited reach, but they seek to fill gaps where federal ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) money and private sector funds donâ t quite get the job done.
In all, federal and state spending on broadband in Vermont adds up to $182 million. Specifically, $172,283,848, as Marshall rattles off, is currently invested in projects and the state has $10.2 million with which they plan to close the remaining coverage gaps.
Some naysayers, such as Thetford selectman and Senate candidate Tig Tillinghast, say reaching the 2013 goal is â not gonna happen.’Tillinghast attributes lack of progress to the â alphabet soup’of different bodies all working on broadband issues. Others simply havenâ t seen results.
A step-by-step process
Results, Marshall says, take time. Broadband projects go through a five- or six-step process from concept to connection: Planning and funding, route and site identification, engineering and design, permitting, procurement and construction.
In the case of wireless Internet providers like Cloud Alliance and Vermont Telephone Companyâ s Wireless Open World project, steps two and three are combined into â network design,’Marshall said.
From start to finish, projects can take anywhere from 20 to 36 months, and for the majority of that time their public visibility is low. Until construction rollout, there are no trucks on the road and no new connections. Fiber projects must be planned pole by pole while wireless projects have to go through the Act 250 or 248a permitting process, all of which takes months.
The good news: most of the roughly 20,000 unserved E911 locations ‘essentially any physical address ‘in Vermont have significant projects far along toward delivering broadband. By the completion of a dozen projects currently under way in the state, there will only be 2,105 locations without broadband. These numbers come from Internet service providers, but Marshall said ConnectVT is also collecting information from consumers, who can report online, atwww.BroadbandVT.org, if they donâ t have broadband service.
Reading the broadband landscape
Marshall is also visiting target communities to check the accuracy of the ISP-provided information. According to the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, Marshall said, ISP coverage information has proved to be roughly 90 percent accurate.
â Thereâ s $172 million at work on the landscape right now,’Marshall said.
Thesecond project, using $116 million from the USDAâ s Rural Utilities Service will help VTel launch their Wireless Open World network, providing wireless broadband to homes in their coverage area at the fringes ofVTelâ s current exchangesand also bringing fiber directly into homes and businesses in VTelâ s current coverage area.The largest project currently under way is the VTel expansion, which has two parts: One $12.9 million project, using a grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, will bring 132 miles of fiber-optic cable into VTelâ s service area, mostly enabling connections to VTel facilities and signal towers.
â If youâ re a VTel customer today, youâ ve got fiber coming your way,’Marshall said.
VTel spokeswoman Sharon Combes-Farr said the buildout is on schedule; theyâ ve subcontracted to two engineering firms who are working separately in the eastern and western parts of the coverage area â street by street’running fiber.
Far out
The state, through a $2.065 million VTA grant, will help VTel install additional towers in the Dummerston area, bringing broadband coverage to an additional 111 unserved locations.
A $2.065 million budget for 111 locations works out at up to $18,604 per home or business. As the stateâ s broadband coverage expands, figures like this are not all that rare.
â If it was really economical to connect all those people,’Marshall says, â they would already have been connected, because the numbers would make sense. But think of it this way: When the cable company says â OK, whatâ s it going to cost us to run that cable up to those six houses?’and itâ s $45,000, and they go â Wait a minute, does that make sense?’What weâ re connecting ‘these last connections ‘theyâ re also the most far-flung â ¦ Youâ re not looking at the most populous areas of the state.â
When all is said and done, 21,243 previously unserved locations are likely to be connected by the end of 2013 at a total public cost (both state and federal) of about $182 million or an average cost of about $8600. The private sectorâ s investments arenâ t negligible; Fairpoint just finished a $61 million project they funded themselves, and EC Fiber recently finished a $1 million buildout.
But the $182 million question is, Will the state have universal broadband by the end of 2013?
â We are bringing every single force to bear on [bringing broadband]. You know, like the governor says ‘yeah, I think we are gonna get there. We have the resources, we have the projects, we have companies working really hard on this. Are there potential things that get us a little bit off line? Sure. Permittingâ s one of them. Site acquisition. You know there are risksâ ¦. That said, weâ re pushing.â
June 18, 2012 vtdigger.org