hill country observerThe independent newspaper of eastern New York, southwestern Vermont and the Berkshires

 

News & Issues April 2020

 

Work at home? Not so fast

Rural towns work to upgrade spotty, slow Internet links

 

Arlene Bentley and Bill Meyer stand with a laptop computer outside the Rosalind K. Kittay Public Library in Rupert, Vt. The local library is the only WiFi hotspot in the rural town, where most residents can’t get high-speed Internet service at home. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

Arlene Bentley and Bill Meyer stand with a laptop computer outside the Rosalind K. Kittay Public Library in Rupert, Vt. The local library is the only WiFi hotspot in the rural town, where most residents can’t get high-speed Internet service at home. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By EVAN LAWRENCE
Contributing writer

RUPERT, Vt.


Bill Meyer lives at the far end of a dirt road.


His online business requires him to send and receive many pages of documents. But his Internet service, via a DSL (direct subscriber line) connection, is slow and unreliable.


The wire that links him to the online world goes through a forest. If the wind is strong or snow brings down a branch, he may lose his connection.


It’s a common situation in this small town in the Taconic Mountains along Vermont’s western border.


“This is typical of rural areas,” Meyer said.


The tiny hamlets of East Rupert and North Rupert, along Route 30 at the eastern edge of town, have comparatively high-speed cable service through Vermont Telephone Co. But the homes in that area account for less than 10 percent of the town’s population of about 700, he said.
Everyone else has DSL -- or nothing at all. The mountains block satellite signals. Thanks to a state program to bring libraries online, the town library has high-speed service. But the small library is open only a few hours a week, Meyer said.


A business in West Rupert that makes replica Early American lighting had to bring in its own fiber-optic line so it could send pictures and work orders to customers, he said.


And now, with people across Vermont, Massachusetts and New York being directed to work at home because of the Covid-19 outbreak, those in towns like Rupert are at a disadvantage.
“There are a lot of people in town who could really use broadband,” Meyer said.


But the town’s small population and rugged terrain make it an unlikely new market for the commercial companies that provide high-speed Internet connections in more populous areas.
“No Comcast or any of those big companies is going to come in and provide service,” Meyer said. “The only way we’ll ever get fiber optic here is through a consortium.”


That’s essentially what Meyer and others across a swath of southwestern Vermont are now working to create, using a legal and financial structure encouraged by recent state legislation.


Few options
Rupert’s slow-lane Internet service is a common one in this mountainous, thinly populated state – and in parts of western Massachusetts and eastern New York.


“Every town is essentially in the same situation,” said Tim Scoggins, the Select Board chairman in Shaftsbury, three towns south of Rupert along the New York border.


“It’s generally the case around here that Comcast is the only option,” he said, referring to the local cable provider. “If you have a Comcast wire going down your road, you’re in good shape.”

Otherwise, Scoggins said, depending on one’s distance from the town center, “you have good DSL, poor DSL, or HughesNet satellite, which is barely anything at all.”


A wireless company in New York claims to cover part of Bennington County, but Scoggins said he doesn’t know anyone who uses it.


“Most Internet service providers exaggerate their coverage area,” he said.
Bennington County has a few public WiFi hot spots at schools, libraries, and state and local offices, mostly in Bennington and Manchester. In Rupert, the only public WiFi is at the library. (See a state map at https://publicservice.vermont.gov/content/public-wifi-hotspots-vermont).
No one expects private broadband providers to fill the void on their own.


According to a February report by the Brookings Institution, broadband in the United States is the sixth most expensive among 23 industrialized countries, about double what Sweden pays. The top reason for the high cost here, according to the report, is that U.S. regulators stopped enforcing pro-competition policies, leaving many people with only one or two Internet providers. Providers aren’t required to offer access to every potential customer, nor do they have to offer everyone the same speeds.


Vermont lawmakers tried to remedy the situation in 2015 by passing legislation that allows towns to form communications union districts, effectively banding together for better broadband coverage. One such district, EC Fiber, was already operating in the east central part of the state. It now has 27 participating towns.


Last year, the state decided to give rural towns in other parts of the state more support to do the same.

 

Towns join forces
State Rep. Kathleen James, D-Manchester, explained that under Act 79, which passed in 2019, the Legislature provided “a lot of financial tools and resources for underserved and rural communities to improve broadband service.”


Under this new law, she said, communications union districts can receive state grants of up to $60,000 to hire a consultant, conduct a feasibility study, and draw up a business plan. Districts can also apply for loans of up to $4 million from the state Economic Development Authority to pay for up to 90 percent of the costs of construction and installation. More construction funds are available through federal programs.


“Over the summer I saw Windham County rallying” to form a communications district, James said. “I thought we needed to do the same here.”


So she reached out to her statehouse colleague, Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, who sent her a checklist of what Windham County was doing and what Bennington County towns would need to do to form their own district.


James organized a public forum in early November, featuring state and local officials involved in broadband expansion.


“We had a really good turnout,” she said. “We had representatives from 15 or 16 communities who wanted to work on this together. They agreed to establish a task force and start meeting regularly to figure out the next steps.”


Scoggins agreed to head the task force, and Meyer stepped in as clerk.
Last month, on Town Meeting Day, 12 Bennington County towns voted to become founding members of the Southern Vermont Communications Union District.


“We’re in the process of forming a governing board,” James said. Each participating town appoints one delegate and one alternate. The board plans to meet in May to organize formally, Scoggins said. Then the new communications district can start applying for grants.


When it has a business plan, the district can request proposals from Internet service providers who would build and operate the system.


Under state law, the communications district cannot take local tax money to pay for infrastructure. Once it’s past the startup stage, the district will pay for its loans and ongoing costs through subscriber fees.


Communications districts elsewhere in the state have proved to be competitive with private providers, but “our first effort is to serve unserved and underserved areas,” Scoggins said.
Based on state data, Scoggins estimated that 8,000 to 10,000 of Bennington County’s 30,000 residents could benefit from fiber-optic service through the district.

Getting connected
High-speed Internet brings many advantages to businesses, education, health care, and even housing in its service area. Vermont has a chronic housing shortage and struggles to attract and retain younger workers.


“Real estate agents say the first two questions that people who want to move to Vermont ask are about schools and availability of broadband,” Meyer said. “People would come here because it’s a beautiful town, but they can’t live without Internet.”


As a former teacher, Meyer said he also understands what happens when some students have Internet access and some don’t.


“It’s hard to run a fair program if you rely too much on Internet resources,” he said.
Scoggins pointed out that better Internet connections are also a matter of public safety.
“One of the big reasons for the fiber-optic push is that remote areas are only served by land lines,” Scoggins said. “The copper wires are old and deteriorating, and the providers aren’t maintaining them. These areas aren’t covered by cell phones. Some people could wind up with no phone service at all.”


James said the Covid-19 outbreak has added urgency to the project.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who wasn’t behind this, but it’s been triple underscored by the pandemic,” she said. “Internet access is critical to people who suddenly have to home-school, for telemedicine, for elderly residents, and for public safety. I look at all the state agencies putting vital information on their websites, and I’m thinking all the time of people not seeing this information because they’re not connected.”


Meyer predicted that Vermont eventually will have 15 communication districts providing high-speed connections to all parts of the state.


“But it’s like defending the U.S. with 50 state militias,” he said. “We’re stuck with a hodgepodge for the time being.”

 

In Mass., a split over structure
In Massachusetts, Berkshire County has struggled with many of the same problems as Vermont when it comes to Internet service. In the hill towns of the Berkshires, a small population is widely dispersed over rugged terrain, and many houses are occupied only on weekends or seasonally.
According to 2014 data from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, the state had 44 towns, mostly in the Berkshires and north-central Massachusetts, with limited or no broadband access. Nineteen of those towns were in the Berkshires. As in Vermont, people in more densely settled communities – the cities of Pittsfield and North Adams, and towns along major corridors like U.S. Route 7 -- generally had good coverage. Two clusters totaling seven towns along the New York border and 12 towns on the east side of the county had poor or no service.


The state established the Massachusetts Broadband Institute in 2008 to enable broadband access in all areas of the state. According to information provided by the Massachusetts Technical Collaborative, MBI received $50 million from the state in 2014 to extend existing broadband connections in town centers, created under the previous Middle Mile program, to all homes.


At first, the MBI worked with Wired West, a nonprofit cooperative of about 30 towns that wanted to address their broadband issues as a group. Under a state law that allows towns to form their own utility companies, the goal was for towns to own their broadband systems and contract with Internet service providers to construct and maintain them.


What happened next is a matter of some controversy. According to MBI, some towns balked at the high up-front cost of the collaborative model. Progress stalled.


“The Baker-Polito administration made direct community engagement a core part of the Last Mile program’s relaunch in 2016, which included towns having final say over the solution for their community,” said Peter Larkin, the MBI’s board chairman, in an email. “We also moved away from a one-size-fits-all approach. That allowed us to get towns direct grants to support municipal fiber-to-the-home projects and to launch the process to identify proposals for private companies to close gaps in towns.”


In other words, instead of pursuing a multi-town utility to create infrastructure the towns would collectively own, the MBI’s new approach allowed individual towns to negotiate with private companies who would build, own and operate broadband systems under a franchise agreement.
David Dvore, Wired West’s town and delegate liaison, took a different view of the change in the state’s approach.


“The money got hijacked a little bit,” Dvore said. “The MBI realized that if Wired West went forward with a regional network, it could bypass the Middle Mile network [in town centers], and it wouldn’t provide enough money for the Middle Mile providers.”


At that point, “the MBI did an about-face,” Dvore said. “Every town would have to be on its own. In my mind, that was a huge mistake.”


The MBI “started offering extra money to towns if they’d let the cable or wireless companies own the networks,” he said. “Some took the bait. They’ll be at the mercy of a monopoly.”


However, the Baker administration, in the person of key officials including Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, “did make broadband a priority and get things moving,” Dvore said.

 

Work under way
According to the Massachusetts Technical Collaborative, all 44 towns in the original group, plus another nine who came in later, now “have a path to broadband.” Some, including Mount Washington, West Stockbridge, Hinsdale and Lanesborough, have completed their projects. Others are in various stages of construction or negotiations.


Connection to individual homes has been delayed by the coronavirus outbreak, because workers now can’t enter houses, Dvore said.


“We’ve celebrated completed projects in 17 towns, and it’s clear that residents and municipal leaders are pleased with the new high speed connections,” Larkin wrote. “We’ve heard from residents who can now access new educational software. Town leaders have talked about the increase they’ve seen to residential home values. And we’ve heard from small business owners that can install new point-of-sale systems and communicate with customers and vendors. It really is life changing for these small communities.”


The towns of Becket, New Salem, Rowe, Washington and Windsor stayed with Wired West, Dvore said. They contracted with Whip City Fiber, a subsidiary of Westfield Gas + Electric, to construct and operate the system for them.


“We’re getting rave reviews” from customers who have been connected, Dvore said. “We think some towns who decided to operate on their own, once they see what’s involved, may return to Wired West.”


Supporters of Wired West have argued that by banding together, towns can have more control and develop better, higher-speed service than what individual towns can get commercial companies to provide.


“Towns don’t always have the people with the expertise needed to do it themselves,” Dvore said. “It would have been a lot more efficient if the towns could coordinate.”


Service now “is kind of a patchwork thing,” he said. “It’s not as good as it could have been, but the towns are getting service.”

 

In N.Y., state takes charge
Where Vermont is encouraging towns to forge their own paths and Massachusetts has a town-state model, broadband expansion in New York has been very much top-down. The state has contracted directly with private providers to build and operate new fiber optic, cable and wireless service, seemingly with little or no input from counties or municipalities. The state’s Broadband Program Office did not respond to requests for comment in mid- and late March.


In 2015, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the New New York Broadband Program, an estimated 2.42 million locations in the state lacked broadband access, with the greatest need upstate. The goal was to ensure access for everyone by 2018, with minimum speeds of 100 megabits per second (mbps) in most areas and 25 mbps farther out.


The state made a $500 million commitment in 2015 to fund Round 1, which brought service to 2.2 million locations. Round 2 added more than 80,000. Round 3, announced in 2017, awarded $209.7 million to connect the remaining 122,000 homes, businesses and community institutions.
Some Round 3 projects received an additional $170 million in federal funds. All the work was to be done by 2018, but crews were still installing cables in southern Washington County in the early months of this year.