[A] nonprofit consortium based in Royalton says it will extend fiber-optic Internet cable to virtually every address in six rural towns next year, and it plans to keep building until more than 20 towns are served.
ECFiber plans to run fiber-optic cable — the technology that harnesses the speed of light to bring customers the highest speeds currently available — throughout Barnard, Thetford, Strafford, West Windsor, Pomfret and Pittsfield in 2017.
ECFiber wrote in a news release that it chose those six towns because the residents demonstrated the highest demand for fiber. Including existing customers, an average of 35 percent of households and businesses in the towns have pre-subscribed for the service.
ECFiber is a municipal utility with 24 member towns largely in Orange, Windsor and Windham counties. The organization started in 2010 with a mission to bring fiber-optic cable to rural homes and has been slowly gaining the borrowing power to build out a whole network.
“Our mission is to build and operate a universal, open access, fiber-to-the-premises network, bringing state-of-the-art connectivity to every home, business and civic institution in all of our member towns,” said Irv Thomae, the chair of the ECFiber board, in a news release.
“We are pleased that at last we can provide universal coverage to six entire towns with 250 miles of new network, thanks to our recent financing,” Thomae said. “We plan to continue this process of covering towns which have the highest demand over the next several years until the entire district is covered.”
ECFiber lobbied for a law during the 2015 legislative session that allowed it to be designated as a “communications union district” starting Jan. 1. The designation has allowed ECFiber to borrow large sums of money, move out of startup mode, and speed up its goal to bring universal fiber-optic cable to its member towns.
Carole Monroe, the chief executive officer of ValleyNet, which operates ECFiber, said the organization charges $99 per customer to hook up a house to the network and will charge just $75 to the households in the six towns that signed up during the campaign.
Monroe said ECFiber does not find it too expensive to extend fiber to homes. She declined to say how much it costs to install a mile of fiber-optic cable, but she said the utility finances it through revenue bonds and spends about $1,200 to hook up a single household.
“We’re a startup that doesn’t have to have the same rate of return that a FairPoint or a Comcast needs to have for their stockholders, and so as a startup and as a municipal utility, our focus and our mission is different,” Monroe said.
“When Comcast says it can’t build unless there are 30 addresses in a mile, it’s not that they can’t make money on it,” she said. “It’s that they can’t make enough money on it to appease their stockholders.”
“We want to make money, but only so that we can pour it back into additional builds,” Monroe said.
