The state’s current proposal for a 10-year Telecommunications Plan would make Vermont a “laughing stock” for the industry, critics told lawmakers Thursday at a Statehouse public hearing.
A parade of citizens — many involved in the 24-town joint venture EC Fiber — fired shot after shot at the policy document, prepared for comment by the Department of Public Service. None of the telecommunications lobbyists in attendance spoke on the record. Most of the testimony surrounded targeted Internet speeds.
Several witnesses suggested the plan should be withdrawn and restarted from scratch because the targeted progression of Internet speeds it laid out for the next decade are already obsolete.
House Commerce Chair Rep. Bill Botzow, D-Bennington, said the comments in opposition to the draft plan did not take him by surprise.
“They do come from leaders in fiber to the home, and they make sense from their perspective,” Botzow said.
But the feasibility of their suggestions remains to be seen, he said, and the department’s draft plan didn’t illuminate a strategy.
“I’m not sure we could really see where the priorities are amongst the landscape you’ve laid out,” Botzow told DPS Commissioner Chris Recchia and telecommunications director Jim Porter at the hearing’s close.
The Telecom Plan is supposed to serve as a road map for the state’s policies and investments in public and private telecommunications infrastructure.
In its draft version, the department proposed focusing first on getting all addresses in the state up to 4 Mbps (megabits per second) download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed by 2020. If the Federal Communications Commission raises its standards to 10/1 Mbps this winter, the state would likely lift its own bar, too.
But nothing in the plan suggests ways to reach higher speeds, despite a mandate to make 100 Mbps upload and download speeds available to all addresses in the state by 2024. According to Act 190, which Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law June 16, the Telecom Plan should outline a path for making that level of symmetrical service available with the best commercially available technology and without limiting the ability to tap into future technological advancements.
Recchia and Porter said they just don’t know how to do it, much less how to pay for it. Porter said it could cost $1 billion to bring fiber to the 230,000-plus addresses whose service doesn’t currently meet the 4/1 Mbps standards, though EC Fiber officials said his estimates were too high.
Even steps to deliver 4/1 Mbps service to the roughly 23 percent of Vermont addresses that can’t currently access it are not made clear in the draft plan.
Department officials said their ability to plan is hampered by uncertain funding and limited regulatory authority. Recchia said he appreciated the feedback, however negative, and would take it to heart.
“But I don’t have $1 billion today,” Recchia said. “And I’m counting on technological changes also, to get us to a goal that otherwise might be difficult to reach.”
Recchia said the department will take public comment through the end of September, and will adopt a final plan by Nov. 1.
Public hearings were held from Monday through Thursday this week in Burlington, Brattleboro, Barre and Rutland. Porter said by email Friday that a fifth hearing in St. Johnsbury is scheduled for Sept. 4. Another has been requested in Orange County; it will be held in Strafford on Sept. 14 at an undetermined location. Only the meetings that have passed are listed on the department’s website.
The fiber advocates who unleashed their frustration Thursday said one of the core problems with the department’s approach is its focus on download speeds.
The draft as it’s written “misses the point of what a rural economy needs,” said Leslie Nulty of Jericho, a former project coordinator for EC Fiber. She said Vermont would quickly become into a “backwater” with the department’s approach.
“My concern is right now, that if this plan is accepted and adopted as it stands, it will, in fact, create a barrier to Vermont getting the kind of network development that it needs, and it will be a recipe for retrograde, backward movement on economic and social development,” Nulty said. “I think this is something the Legislature and the administration need to look at very seriously. It’s a deep, deep concern.”
Several critics also questioned the department’s dismissal of “open access” infrastructure in the plan. The concept of open access entails the builder of infrastructure leasing space on utility poles, for example, to other service providers. The stated goal is to promote competition and facilitate buildout.
State law directing the department to develop the telecom plan includes an order to promote open access. Many advocates feel that publicly funded projects — whereby a private company receives public money to build infrastructure — should mandate open access because it facilitates public benefits.
But the department said in the plan that the concept of open access, as raised during public testimony leading up to the draft, is too vague to be implemented. Additionally, caveats in some federal grant programs allow commercial entities to avoid open access mandates if the mechanism would undermine their market viability.
Stephen Whitaker, a vocal proponent of open access and critic of the state’s long-term telecommunications planning, testified Thursday that he felt the department should push harder against resistance to open access by telecom companies.
“I believe that the Department of Public Service, whose charge is to be the public advocate, has lost its compass. And it’s been years in the making,” Whitaker said.
Lawmakers focused the hearing on taking testimony and had little time to ask questions of either the department or the witnesses.
“They want someone to give them a grant to build a tower to cherry pick the customers — the customers they can charge whatever they want to,” MacDonald said. “And they wish to be able to come in and lobby us against anything that would give them competition.”
The joint committee’s next moves are not clear, but there’s no indication the Legislature has any authority to accept or reject the administration’s Telecom Plan. It simply must be kept apprised of it, and Recchia said the department would incorporate feedback from all parties as much as possible.
The 2015 legislative session almost certainly will entail continued conversations about the state’s telecom capacity, as lawmakers last spring decided to shake up its administrative oversight.
CORRECTION: The state would raise internet speeds to 4 Mbps (megabits per second) download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed by 2020, under the plan. We originally had the download and upload speeds reversed.
