ECFiber, FairPoint Communications, and Comcast will split about $875,000 in universal service fund money to serve Norwich, Pittsfield, Randolph, Royalton, Jamaica, Rochester, Reading and Bradford.
Those addresses in Orange, Rutland and Windsor counties currently have Internet access at snail-like speeds. The state is requiring each company to offer minimum downloading speeds of 10 Mbps.
Gov. Peter Shumlin announced the three Connectivity Initiative grants totaling $874,640 at a news conference Wednesday, where he said Vermont’s economy “cannot” function without sufficient Internet access.
“It’s no different than the telephone lines and electric lines, the challenge that Governor [George] Aiken faced [in the 1930s], back when that was being distributed through poles and wires,” Shumlin said of broadband. “I don’t think there’s a more important goal for a small, rural state.”
ECFiber will receive the largest grant, and use $354,000 to run fiber-optic Internet cable in Pittsfield, Randolph, Royalton and a small corner of Norwich.
Staffed largely by volunteers, the 24-municipality consortium offers speeds between 7 Mbps downloading and uploading, and 400 Mbps downloading and uploading in several of its member towns. Most customers pay about $100 per month, according to Irv Thomae, chairman of the ECFiber governing board.
“Until now, most of our funding is from private sources,” Thomae said. “Most of what we’ve been able to do so far — we now have more than 1,000 folks connected — has been by borrowing money in small quantities from local people.”
Thomae also announced Wednesday that the company would connect schools, libraries, town halls and other public buildings in its service area to 400 Mbps symmetrical service at the price of its lowest speed offering.
Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange, joked that schoolteachers in his town would be disappointed that kids won’t be able to use their slow Internet speeds as an excuse for not doing their homework.
Representatives for Comcast and FairPoint did not attend the Wednesday news conference. But Department of Public Service Commissioner Chris Recchia said their projects will “leapfrog” over current speed standards so Vermonters can use the technology for years to come.
FairPoint will use $290,000 to run copper cable from its existing fiber lines and bring 10 Mbps downloading and 1 Mbps uploading speeds to homes in Reading and Bradford. Comcast will spend $230,640 to bring 150 Mbps downloading and 50 Mbps uploading speeds to Norwich, Jamaica and Rochester.
Jim Porter, senior policy and telecommunications director for the Department of Public Service, said there are only “a handful” of Enhanced 911 addresses in Vermont that still don’t have Internet or a funded solution in place.
Porter is expecting 601 addresses to receive access to broadband by the end of the year through a $146.8 million VTel project, which started in 2011 with $116 million in loans and grants from the federal stimulus package.
Using the department’s years-old definition of broadband — 768 kilobits per second downloading and 200 kilobits per second uploading — that means 99.8 percent of Vermont E-911 addresses have broadband right now. The speed is fast enough to download an email but too slow to stream a movie.
While the state has worked toward the goal of universal broadband, the Federal Communications Commission has increased its official definition for “broadband” substantially. This year, the FCC said it wanted its new definition to be 25 Mbps downloading and 3 Mbps uploading.
No federal money has been put toward that goal yet, but the FCC is slated to offer grants by the end of the year to FairPoint in Vermont to help connect customers to 4 Mbps for downloading and 1 Mbps for uploading.
