Editor’s note: This article is by John Lippman of the Valley News in which it was first published March 20, 2016.
A plan to bring cell phone service to nearly 1,000 miles of Vermont roads that do not get any signal reception has been sharply curtailed four years after the project was announced with great fanfare.
VTel Wireless, a subsidiary of Springfield, Vt.-based Vermont Telephone Co., has dropped plans to provide cell phone service along roads in 35 unserved areas around the state, according to the Federal Communications Commission. The company will move forward with providing cell phone service along about 343 miles of roads in 11 areas in Vermont, mostly in northern part of the state.
The 11 areas in which VTel will provide mobile phone service include parts of Bennington, Caledonia, Essex, Orleans, Rutland and Windham counties. The 35 areas where it dropped plans to offer mobile phone service are in parts Addison, Franklin, Lamoille, Orange, Washington and Windsor counties. VTel also withdrew plans to offer mobile phone service in parts of Bennington, Caledonia, Essex, Orleans, Rutland and Windham counties, according to the FCC.
The cell phone service to be provided by VTel is part of the FCC’s Mobility Fund Phase I program, a federal funding initiative that set aside $300 million for telecommunications companies to cover so-called “black holes” around the country where cell phone service is unavailable.
The funding was awarded through a “reverse auction” in which the FCC sought the lowest bidder willing to undertake the job of providing mobile phone service to rural pockets left unserved by providers.
VTel’s decision not to move forward with tapping the funding for the 35 sites it initially sought from the FCC put the company in “default” of its award, and as a result is liable for a default payment. The payment amounts to 5 percent of the funding awarded for each site, for a total of about $86,000.
Under the original plan, VTel was awarded $2 million by the FCC that was to go toward the installation of infrastructure to extend cell phone coverage along 941 miles of Vermont roads. As it now stands, VTel will tap only $262,000 of the money made available to the company under the award.
VTel has until March 12, 2019, to complete the project or the funding expires.
“We’re disappointed VTel is not going to be providing the cellular service it said it would to Vermont areas that do not receive it,” said James Porter, director of the telecommunications and connectivity division of the state’s Department of Public Service.
Although the state didn’t have any role in VTel’s federally funded project, Porter said his department is working with Cambridge, Mass.-based CoverageCo to build 500 cell sites around the state that would bring coverage to unserved areas. CoverageCo contracts with cell phone providers to extend coverage so that customer calls are not dropped when traveling through a “black hole.”
Porter said the CoverageCo project, which is “requiring a lot of resources,” should be completed with the next 12 to 18 months.
“Once that project is completed we’ll start looking at potential other areas” to extend cell phone coverage, he said.
VTel president Michel Guite did not respond to request seeking comment. But he told Vermont Public Radio that VTel decided not to move forward with a majority of the sites because of federal regulations regarding the provision of a cell phone caller’s geographical location for 911 emergency calls. He said the 911 requirements are not compatible with the 4G LTE technology that VTel plans to deploy in its network. (The voice portion of mobile wireless communications typically is carried over 3G networks.)
The FCC-funded cell phone project is one of two mobile phone projects that VTel has contracted to deploy in the state.
The other is mobile voice service over the company’s statewide wireless broadband 4G LTE data network that it built with federal stimulus funding. VTel received a $2.6 million grant from the former Vermont Telecommunications Authority in 2013 to add mobile voice service onto its data network, although that service also has not yet been deployed.
Although the wireless broadband network has been built and VTel has begun advertising its availability, the company has not said how many customers have signed up.
Guite has said in interviews that network is in a testing phase before it becomes fully operational. VTel says on the company’s website it will begin offering voice-over-LTE, known as VoLTE, in 2016, although it has not provided any more specific information.