This commentary is by Stephen Whitaker of Montpelier, an author who has worked for 30 years on integrating planning, government transparency and accountability, public records access and more recently utility networks resiliency.
The Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee members are treating the unplanned $200 million (so far) broadband initiative with kid gloves.
They seem to be swallowing hook, line and sinker a lot of misleading, incomplete or downright deceptive information. Truth be told, the Vermont Community Broadband Board still has no engineer, still has no adopted network standards and certainly has no plan or accountability.
There are questions about certain board members, specifically Dan Nelson with VELCO, Rep. Laura Sibilia, and Holly Groschner.
Dan Nelson, VELCO’s fiber architect, is not wanting to reveal details about, or make available, the VELCO fiber network as the logical high-capacity backbone for this broadband architecture, complete with resiliency and security requirements, transparent price information, equipment capacity and location information. This stubborn opaqueness is despite the fact that VELCo’s transmission network, including the fiber network, is owned 51% by Vermont’s electric ratepayers.
Laura Sibilia was appointed by the Vermont Communications Union Districts Association, an organization that does not officially exist, according to the Vermont Secretary of State’s database, despite the legislation prohibiting legislators from being appointed to the Vermont Community Broadband Board by the House speaker and Senate president pro tem. She cannot legitimately serve on the broadband board and the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee and as vice chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee, as both committees are charged with oversight of the broadband board’s activities.
And finally Holly Groschner, formerly of Vermont PBS, which sold Vermonters’ valuable TV spectrum without notice or discussion, and garnered all of the $53 million in proceeds to PBS alone. Groschner is now CEO of a new nonprofit funded as a start-up by a communications union district, intending to manage the massive subsidies necessary when unaffordable broadband networks are brought to market.
The Vermont Community Broadband Board executive director, Christine Hallquist, seriously misled the oversight committee by suggesting that a statewide engineered fiber design would take “a lot of time” — two years to complete, they were told. That process could be done easily in six months due to the high-quality geographic information datasets Vermont has compiled for poles, fiber, cable, etc. It could have been completed by now, had it been started back when the broadband board was first convened and the money was made available, as the authority to spend it on a statewide engineered fiber design was passed as part of the broadband bill.
Director Hallquist told the committee that 30 V.S.A. § 202c, on state telecommunications policy and planning, are goals, but they are just “aspirational goals” and should not bind their thinking or their actions. The plain language of the statute says nothing about these policies being optional or aspirational. It reads further on, with a shall: “support competitive choice for consumers among telecommunications service providers and promote open access among competitive service providers on nondiscriminatory terms to networks over which broadband and telecommunications services are delivered” and “strengthen the state’s role in telecommunications planning.”
The statute continues: “to maintain and improve governmental and public services, public safety, and the economic development of the state”;
(8) support deployment of broadband infrastructure that:
(A) uses the best commercially available technology;
(B) does not negatively affect the ability of Vermont to take advantage of future improvements in broadband technology or result in widespread installation of technology that becomes outmoded within a short period after installation.”
All those criteria are current statutory policy, yet are being shortchanged or ignored by the direction the broadband board is heading right now.
All fiber networks are not created equal.
Christine Hallquist is suggesting that we defer any action on providing for the statutorily required competitive choice and open access for five years, when all the federal money will have been spent, all the fiber will be in place and it will not have been designed to allow any competitor to share the fiber facilities to provide lower-cost, more reliable or better technology services to subscribers across that same infrastructure.
The discussion of whether to use middle-mile fiber that’s already in place — owned by FirstLight, VTel, Level3 or others — ignores the fact that Sovernet, its initial fiber network built as statewide rings, were paid for with public money. These funds were granted to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program and passed through to Sovernet. Therefore the state, being the VTA, its heirs and assigns, which includes the Department of Public Service, is still accountable for that fiber and for adhering to those contract terms.
Those terms include no discriminatory open access to Sovernet, now FirstLight fiber’s lit services, but excluding any dark fiber. Similarly, Consolidated Communications fiber network was subsidized with $50 million in public funds as part of a Public Utility Commission service-quality investigation “settlement.”
Yet no one has sought to determine and quantify precisely what open access terms and prices are available, due to the fact that this is a publicly funded network. We were told, or the committee was told, that it would take two years to do a statewide engineered fiber network design. We were also told that Vermont is lacking the trained and available workforce, so there may not be much of a construction season in 2022 because of the time it’s going to take to recruit, train and then field-train these fiber building technicians.
The acknowledged lack of available workforce clearly makes the needed time available to complete a proper statewide engineered fiber design. Had the Public service Department completed a credible telecommunications plan in 2014, 2018 or 2021, we would already know the locations of available fiber, poles, and where resiliency is lacking. Now the money is beginning to flow and we are “behind the eight-ball,” so to speak.
The conclusion made by Hallquist that the Gigabit Passive Optical Network is appropriate to serve as the architecture in Vermont, able to support competition and upgrade ability, is faulty. Any splitters, but especially 32-way fiber splitters of light signals, make it impossible to troubleshoot and repair infrastructure issues without a truck-roll to the splitter cabinet.
Similarly, there is no simple way to allow competitors’ services to coexist on a passive network with splitters installed. The savings in fiber costs are often offset by the increased maintenance costs and the precluding of competition.
Again, there’s still no engineer or expertise either in the Legislature or at the broadband board to clarify that active fiber, active ethernet architecture, is the technology to use that would allow for the manageability and the access by willing competitors, to provide service over fiber built with public funds, consistent with statutory policy that the infrastructure not be soon outmoded.
The suggestion that folks in Colchester might use universal service funds to extend cable networks at 25/3 is contrary to the direction and purpose for which the broadband board was created and staffed. And let’s not fail to mention the fact that the universal service fund is already running short of revenues based on the 2.4% universal service charge, from which the broadband board is capturing the top 0.4%, leaving the more crucial 911 system unable to meet its obligations.
The description of the universal service plan that Hallquist offered, what was described as a plan to serve every single address, is also flawed. What she failed to mention is that the plans that are being written are to serve every single “universal” address in reality only applies to those addresses that do not already have cable service. To be clear, the universal service plans being prepared by communications union districts are not going to detail a strategy, a design or costs of delivering fiber to every E911 address.
The statutory goal in 30 V.S.A. § 202c is to serve every E-911 address in Vermont with symmetrical fiber speed connectivity by the year 2024. This may still be possible by 2024, but only if a statewide engineered fiber plan is completed, the electric utilities are enlisted to mount the fiber on all their poles, and the amateurs stay out of the way.
