Gov. Peter Shumlin is closing the gap on his 2010 campaign promise of universal statewide broadband by the end of 2013. On Wednesday, he was on hand to ceremonially connect 4,000 potential new customers to high-speed wireless Internet at a Cloud Alliance tower in Plainfield.
Cloud Alliance, a small Vermont-based Wireless Internet Service Provider, built out the $500,000 coverage expansion after it received a $240,000 grant from the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, a governmental entity established in 2007 with the goal of investing in and coordinating investments into broadband and cellular expansion in Vermont.
Michael Birnbaum, general manager of Cloud Alliance, said the project would not have been possible without governmental assistance.
“We’re small and we’re local,” he said. “Because we’re small and local, we don’t have the resources to do what the big corporations can do. We need support and we’ve gotten that support.”
There are still more than 20,000 unserved E911 locations in the state (an E911 location is essentially a street address). About 18,000 unserved locations are in the process of getting high-speed coverage through the federally funded Vermont Telephone Co. project which includes fiber and a Wireless Open World (WOW) network.
Karen Marshall, head of Connect VT, is responsible for the success of Shumlin’s end-of-2013 promise, and she said Vermont is on track for full last-mile broadband coverage by Dec. 31, 2013.
There are 2,105 unserved E911 locations statewide where there is no current project in place to extend coverage, Marshall said, but the state has $10.2 million it plans to invest to get projects in “the pipeline” by the end of July 2012.
“This is one of a dozen projects that are under way across the state right now,” Marshall said. “When the governor talks about our end of 2013 goal, we’re charging very, very hard. We have a dozen projects currently at work, they are in fiber installation – literally you see it on the roads with crews, please be careful and mindful of those crews – other wireless projects are in permitting and site acquisition and beginning their installation, so it’s a really exciting time on this beautiful landscape of ours.”
The permitting process, Shumlin said, was the biggest obstacle to the 2013 deadline when he took office. Birnbaum said, that legislation greatly helped with the permitting process.
“Without the 248a section of the law, we would have had to apply for eight permits,” Birnbaum said. “One in each municipality as local zoning and Act 250, so whether the permits are easier or harder, there’s eight versus one, so right there is a huge savings in effort.”
Title 30, Section 248a is an alternative to Act 250 environmental review available to the telecom industry. Section 248a reviews are conducted by the Vermont Public Service Board.
“We’ve created a seamless, smart, faster, more logical permitting process,” Shumlin said.
The press conference took place amid knee-high grass still wet from Tuesday night’s rains, and Shumlin stood between Cloud Alliance’s older tower, a telephone pole-style post mounted with antennae and a new, 100-foot high metal tower. As for the symbolic gesture that got the whole four-antenna project running: Shumlin screwed a cover onto an electrical panel on the outside of an equipment shed.
Four screws later, the governor took out an iPhone, snapped a photo of the 100-foot tower gleaming in the noontime sun, and “beam[ed] it over the Internet.”
The 100-foot Cloud Alliance tower does not host antennae that serve mobile phones.
