Editor’s note: This commentary is by Katherine Sims, who is director of the Northeast Kingdom Collaborative. A version of this commentary aired on VPR on May 2.
[L]ately I’ve been spending a lot of time in a bathroom. It’s not what you’re thinking.
Nope. I hang out in the basement bathroom of a Greensboro church for the fast internet. And I’m thankful for Spark, the new co-working space close to my house, for providing the fiber connection and the room — now used just as a phone booth, with a table and plants — where I know I can participate in the video conference calls that are a big part of my job.
A tech company co-founder I know takes turns with his wife uploading data files from their shared home office. The local librarian pays two different service providers so there’s a backup for patrons when one inevitably goes out for hours. A doctor friend has to rent a second office to have the bandwidth for telemedicine. The internet available to most of the Northeast Kingdom, and other rural parts of Vermont, simply does not support modern life.
People patch it together. But we know it’s a drag on our economy and it drives young people away. If these weren’t big enough problems, we know there are more on the horizon.
Soon, fast, reliable and affordable internet will be like electricity — needed for basic services, safety and health. My new hot water heater lets me monitor its performance and change settings over Wi-Fi. Renewing a driver’s license is much easier online. Doctors’ offices encourage making appointments and requesting prescription refills over the web. This is the norm in most places in our country. Eventually, this will be the only way it’s done.
All Vermonters deserve access to this essential resource. It’s clear the large communications companies that dominate the market won’t solve this problem for us. There is not enough money to be made in our small villages and sparsely populated valleys.
The big leaps in service lately across the state have come from communities banding together, like EC Fiber in the Upper Valley, or partnering with small providers. In Craftsbury, where I live, the town received federal grants to build its own 13-mile fiber network, which it leased last year to Kingdom Fiber, a locally owned company that is starting to hook up customers. The percentage of buildings in town with access to true broadband speeds went from 8% to almost half.
The Vermont House overwhelmingly approved a bill in late March to provide more direct funding, loans and planning grants for community-owned and public/private broadband efforts to support efforts like these. Now, with adjournment looming, it seems as if this commonsense legislation may end up stuck in the Senate Finance Committee.
I hope Senate leaders understand how important this issue is to their rural constituents. A committee discussion of H.513 is on their schedule this week. They should act quickly to get the bill out for a vote on the floor.
We can’t afford to wait another year – and I’d really like to get out of the bathroom.
