NEK Broadband is receiving $17.5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to connect the most remote parts of the Northeast Kingdom to fiber optic broadband internet service, the communications union district and Vermont’s congressional delegation announced Wednesday.
The grant will cover most of a $23.5 million project in the most rural part of the Northeast Kingdom, said Christa Shute, executive director of NEK Broadband, in testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry on Wednesday.
She was one of two Vermonters who gave testimony in Washington, D.C.
NEK Broadband is one of 10 communications union districts in Vermont. It is made up of 56 municipalities in the Northeast Kingdom. Vermont’s model for rolling out fiber optic service to every address in the state relies on communities banding together into districts so that they can better negotiate with internet service providers.
Appearing before the Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy, Shute said the funding will enable NEK Broadband to build out 321 miles of high-speed fiber optic broadband across 22 of the most rural and underserved towns in the Northeast Kingdom.
Also Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., in his first hearing as chair of the subcommittee, reintroduced the Reconnecting Rural America Act, a bill to reauthorize a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to fund high-speed broadband for rural communities.
“One of the big challenges in rural America is access to high-speed high-quality broadband,” Welch said in his opening remarks.
Witnesses in the hearing differed over whether the Department of Agriculture should favor fiber optic cable over other technologies in rural areas. To some extent, the disagreement reflected regional differences among parts of the country where large farms predominate and others, such as Vermont, that are trying to develop rural businesses that rely on the ability to upload and download at high speeds.
Justin Forde, a lobbyist for Midco, an internet service provider in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, argued that the Department of Agriculture should be neutral on whether broadband should be made available through fiber optic or through fixed wireless broadband. He said farmers need to be able to get broadband in the field as agricultural technology becomes increasingly connected, and laying down fiber optic cable would be impractical on large farms.
Forde argued that download speeds are more important than upload speeds in his part of the country, and he pushed for connecting people who have no broadband before upgrading service where there is already slower broadband service.
The two Vermonters testifying, Shute and Roger Nishi, vice president of industry relations at Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom, disagreed with Forde.
“When you live in rural areas with mountains, that wireless service does not always exist,” Shute said.
Nishi said a designer working in a rural area might need as much upload speed as download speed. He pushed for a federal standard of 100 megabytes upload and download. That is the standard that Vermont is aiming for as it works toward providing fiber optic broadband to every address.
“Any money spent on broadband deployment should go to future-proof technologies like fiber that achieve speeds of at least 100/100 Mbps,” said Rob Fish, deputy director of the Vermont Community Broadband Board, in an email to VTDigger.
In his closing remarks before the subcommittee, Welch argued against giving “second-class service to rural America,” indicating his support for fast download and upload speeds.
“We’re trying to get folks to come into rural America,” he said. “Those people will not come unless they’re confident they have reliable high speed internet.”