Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Tim Nulty, former head of Burlington Telecom. He is ECFiber’s project director.
VTel, a profitable, private corporation whose wealthy owner resides in a mansion in Greenwich Conn., was awarded a grant of about $80 million of U.S. taxpayer money to provide 4G/LTE wireless broadband service to all of Vermont. This has been trumpeted as a huge win for Vermont.
What are the facts?
1. 4G/LTE has not been deployed anywhere beyond test cases…..let alone in challenging mountainous, heavily forested environments like Vermont.
2. Most of the planned Vermont installation will be on existing cellphone towers. LTE performance is highly dependant on having not merely a signal, but a strong signal. Thus effective 4G/LTE coverage is unlikely to be better than existing cell coverage—and may be worse. In other words, if you don’t currently have a strong cell signal at your house, don’t hold your breath for 4G/LTE service.
3. Even for those who do get a usable signal, the service will only be roughly equivalent to DSL. Even if it works as advertised its capacity is less than 1/10,000th of optical fiber (no, that number is not a “typo”). In particular it will not stream video—and the majority of broadband is video (of all kinds—not just TV). By 2013, Cisco predicts that 90% of broadband traffic will be video.
4. “DSL-like” service sounds good to the many Vermonters who are currently stuck with Dial-up—but it is nowhere near adequate for the future. Remember 10 years ago when dial-up was fine? Today, dial-up is nearly useless. DSL is (barely) adequate today—but will be like dial-up before long. Even for those people who can get the 4G/LTE service, it will be far inferior to what the people of Burlington, Waitsfield, Topsham and Northfield already get (or will soon get) from the fiber deployments in their area. The clincher is that Guite, himself is NOT relying on 4G/LTE for his OWN area—that will get fiber. Subscribers in the fiber areas get service on the first day that is literally 10,000 times as good as the 4G/LTE will be—even if the latter works at all!! And fiber can be easily upgraded almost infinitely….wireless cannot.
5. What about the claim that fiber is too expensive for rural areas? FACTS: Fiber is the CHEAPEST way to get UNIVERSAL coverage. Wireless can be cheap if you intend to “cherry pick” the easiest areas to reach, but is very expensive if you try to use it to reach every last citizen. Despite assertions to the contrary, it is hard not to conclude that “cherry picking” is the real VTel plan.—especially when one sees that the deployment will mainly be on existing cell towers. That fiber is the best AND the cheapest is well known to all real industry experts. The Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) only awards loans where it is confident that a project can pay the loan back. Where it is not confident in the economics of a project—but wants to support a project for experimental (or political) reasons–it provides grants. It is very revealing that RUS provided loans to VTel for the fiber project in VTel’s own territory, to Waitsfield Telephone for their fiber project, and to Topsham for their fiber project two years ago. But it provided a grant for the 4G/LTE wireless experiment. This is consistent with what RUS done all over rural America: They have made LOANs to fiber projects….and GRANTS to the iffier, “experimental” projects. Over ½ of all RUS stimulus money has gone to “last mile” fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) projects in rural areas—virtually all with majority loans. This includes a $56 million loan to Lake County, Minnesota for a rural fiber project which is a virtual clone of the ECFiber project here in Vermont—but located in an area even more rural and sparsely populated than Vermont. Nothing could speak more eloquently about how RUS experts view the relative economic merits of fiber and wireless: Fiber is ready for prime time, its economic and technical performance are solid and proven. Wireless is economically and technically unproven and needs massive subsidies in the form of free grants of taxpayer money in order to have any chance of survival.
What does the VTel 4G/LTE Grant really mean for Vermont? The RUS has clearly concluded that Fiber-to-the-Home is the best, and most economical way to bring rural America in to the 21st century for telecom…that is why the majority of their awards have been for such projects—and these awards have been overwhelmingly in the form of loans. For Vermont, however, they have decided to place most of their money on an experiment. Vermont is being made a “guinea pig” for a new, unproven wireless technology. Of course, the main “lab technician” executing this experiment, VTel, chose not to inflict it on its own subscribers—for them, it chose fiber. No wonder: Nobody would administer experimental drugs to their own family members if there are better, proven versions available.
But the rest of the state is being forced to participate in an experiment to see if wireless works. To make certain that VTel’s experiment is not hampered by competition, both the Federal and State legislation prevent support for any other project that falls within the area of the 4G/LTE experiment…..and that experiment covers the whole state. In other words, all other Vermonters will have to wait 3 – 5 years to see if 4G/LTE provides the broadband our communities need to survive.
Nobody asked Vermonters whether they wanted to be guinea pigs….the decision was made for them in Montpelier, Washington and Greenwich, Connecticut. If the experiment doesn’t work….tough luck, Vermont. As for the $80 million of taxpayer money flushed down the drain? Hey!! That’s a drop in the bucket of federal boondoggles….US taxpayers will never notice!!
