ECFiber, the state’s first operational broadband district, has been deploying a gadget-toting van along back roads in Orange and Windsor counties to collect mapping data for its buildout plans.
District leaders say the information could help communications union districts plan for broadband buildouts across the state.
The ECFiber district serves 31 communities in the east-central region of the state, eight of which have joined since May: Bradford, Corinth, Fairlee, Newbury, Topsham, Washington, Windsor and West Fairlee.
“If we wanted to build next year in any of these towns, we needed to do this work now,” said Chris Recchia, managing director of ValleyNet, which runs the ECFiber broadband network.
To start planning, he said, the district needs to collect data on utility poles in the to-be-added towns. That survey work is typically an analog process, and it’s slow: A person, on foot, visits each pole and calculates the location for attaching fiber to each pole.
To hasten that process, the broadband district turned to Honey Badger Analytics, a Minnesota company that brought a high-tech solution to the problem.
The company uses a van mounted with a scanner that pinpoints and measures each utility pole, through a method called light detection and ranging.
“I call the work we do ‘locational analytics’ because we are taking the exact location of millions of points and processing them to identify each utility pole and get an exact height of every attached wire and ‘see’ where the wires go, and link this data to the photographs,” Brad Folta of Honey Badger Analytics said in a press release Nov. 18.
That data will be paired with photographs taken by a ground team, headed by Fulcrum Fiber, a New Hampshire telecommunications construction firm.
“This is a new technique that we thought would be worthwhile trying out and seeing if it works,” Reccia said.
The pole survey spanned 429 miles, he said, and in ECFiber’s coverage area there are about 26 poles per mile.
The district focuses on utility poles for its buildouts because “they go to pretty much every house,” Reccia said. “They’re a great vehicle for us to use to attach fiber to, to get to those same homes.”
F.X. Flinn, chair of ECFiber’s governing board, said in a press release that the effort “will serve as proof the method works, and perhaps under the Biden administration, support for a statewide effort will be available.”
Reccia said construction plans drawn up from the data might be finished in the spring. After that, the district needs to apply for approval to attach fiber cables to the poles. Construction may begin next summer.
Vermont’s nine communications union districts were established under a 2015 law that sought to address poor access to broadband in rural areas of the state.
The municipal districts have become an important resource during the Covid-19 pandemic, as more people have come to rely on the internet for work, school and telehealth.
