This commentary is by Christine Hallquist of Burlington, executive director of the Vermont Community Broadband Board. For 13 years, she was CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative, and was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2018.
Vermonters are fortunate that throughout the flooding crisis, we were able to reliably call 911, but that hasn’t always been the case. Imagine you’re caught in a flood or other emergency and call 911 for help. But instead of a person answering, you get a recording that says, “System not available.”
Several telecommunication providers in Vermont have experienced network outages that affected their customers’ ability to access the E911 emergency reporting system. There were eight such system outages in 2018 and 2019, and there have been outages annually since then.
E911 systems, landline voice systems, and mobile phones, in addition to standard home internet connections, are all transmitted through fiber to communicate. While a lot of Vermont homes still have traditional copper lines to the home, within a few miles that communication gets handed over to the fiber network.
A break in the network means no connection. Therefore, Vermonters’ ability to call 911 in an emergency depends on that fiber-optic network being reliable, resilient and responsive. Many other important challenges, such as the successful use of renewables to fight climate change, also depend on a reliable, resilient and responsive network.
Telecommunications networks are like our roads. The first mile of the network is like the interstate highway network. We limit access to enable fast, bulk transport. The middle-mile network is like the state highways, where there are many crossings and access, with a lot of traffic. The last mile are your town roads, where there is far less traffic and access can be separated by longer distances.
The Vermont Community Broadband Board, along with Vermont’s Communications Union Districts and private internet service providers, are building a reliable, resilient and responsive fiber-optic broadband network that will connect every on-grid address in Vermont.
Reliability refers to the consistency and predictability of network performance, which can be achieved through preventive maintenance and ongoing performance monitoring. Like your car, the network must be maintained properly to be reliable.
Resiliency refers to the ability of a system to withstand and recover from disruptions and failures, such as natural disasters. For example, if a line were broken in the flood, with a resilient design, the whole network wouldn’t be shut down. There would be another path for the information to travel, so residents wouldn’t be cut off from potentially lifesaving communications in a crisis.
In the context of a fiber-optic broadband network, resiliency can be achieved through geographic redundancy in network design. That could include redundant fiber-optic pathways and integration of backup power sources, creating alternate routes in different places to avoid complete failure if something goes wrong in one area.
Responsiveness refers to how fast the network responds, which is critical for integration of renewable energy and keeping the electricity grid stable. For example, in August 2003, 50 million people lost power in the United States and Canada because a power line contacted a tree in Ohio. This catastrophe can happen in the blink of an eye and at any time. A responsive network enables the grid to be self-healing, resulting in the problem being solved before anyone loses power.
The effects of climate change, including extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and wildfires, make damage to networks more likely and potentially a more frequent event. In this way, climate change is making a reliable, resilient and responsive network more important now than ever.
But this network does more than fight the effects of climate change. It can help stop and reverse climate change by enabling the use of more renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. Renewable energy sources can be intermittent and less predictable than traditional sources, which can create challenges for utilities. For example, less solar and wind power is generated on cloudy days with low wind.
Incorporating energy-storage and demand-response technologies mitigates this problem. Demand-response technologies provide the ability to shed noncritical loads in times when there’s not enough power — for example, you can keep your house a little warmer for a few hours instead of cooling it to where you normally would, or stop charging your car for a few hours.
Building this into network design will address these challenges and improve the reliability and resiliency of the network.
In this way, the Vermont Community Broadband Board network design incorporates geographic redundancy, backup power sources, preventive maintenance and monitoring, as well as energy-storage and demand-response technologies to create a fiber-optic broadband network that is reliable, resilient and responsive to address the effects of climate change as well as enable its solutions.
This approach to Vermont’s fiber-optic network design will allow it to withstand and quickly recover from disruptions, including floods and other natural disasters, and provide consistent, reliable broadband, electric and emergency services while avoiding outages and their potentially catastrophic consequences.
Clarification: This commentary was updated to clarify the nature of outages affecting access to the state’s E911 system.
