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.
Vermont legislators will apparently be appropriating between $200 million and $300 million in the next two years from federal grants to spend on building fiber broadband infrastructure.
How can Vermont make sure we gain the “most fiber miles — the biggest gigabits for the buck”? Serving the most addresses, at the highest speeds, with upgradable technology, and rapidly deployed interim wireless broadband even sooner must be our goal and our path.
We have had for six years now a goal in statute (30 VSA 202c(b)(10)) to reach every E-911 address in Vermont with symmetric fiber speed broadband by 2024. We have wasted those six years without enforcing the law (30 VSA 202d) requiring the Public Service Department to complete a credible 10-year telecommunications plan and strategy.
The goal necessitates bringing fiber not only to the unserved and underserved, but also to all those addresses now served by “25/3 Mbps” coaxial cable broadband service, discovered to be inadequate for pandemic use cases (i.e., simultaneous telehealth videoconference, distance learning and gaming).
However, neither the recently passed federal infrastructure bill nor the American Rescue Plan Act allows for spending these federal funds in areas already served by 25/3 Mbps cable internet services, in effect protecting the cable monopoly territories.
To spend this windfall of federal funding wisely, we must take both a high-level view and complete a low-level detailed, engineered fiber design to reach each and every E-911 address in Vermont, while immediately building only to the “unserved” addresses allowed under the federal funding terms and conditions. Other sources of funding must be identified to achieve truly “universal broadband service” to the cable-served areas too.
Completing both tasks over the next five years will set Vermont on the path to economic prosperity, population growth and national leadership in education, telehealth, civic engagement, sustainable development and reduced carbon impacts!
Or we could just bumble along on the present course to build a hodge-podge of amateur communications union district wannabe monopoly Internet service providers, bypassing and leaving intact the cable monopolies, ignoring the lack of storm resilience and extreme vulnerability to long power outages and blocked 911 calls, and yet still result in broadband service that is unaffordable to many Vermonters, requiring perpetual subsidies.
Or we can really get busy to complete a cost-effective statewide engineered fiber design, tailored to be most cost-effective, flexible to more users, supporting competitive choice for subscribers, open access to competitors. reliable, upgradeable, supporting symmetric gigabit-speed broadband service costing about $70 per month, similar to what Google Fiber and VTel have proven to be do-able.
Everybody wins this way, with prices driven down by competition and service quality/customer service and satisfaction increased.
What we can do
We can make best use of this one-time federal money by completing statewide, resilient, middle-mile fiber along every electric utility pole corridor, in the public right-of-way, and we can do it debt-free, building a foundation for long-term affordability, avoiding the current unrealistic and unsustainable CUD trajectory of more than $100 or $150 per month (or higher) broadband bills that ECFiber or Tilson monopolies are now charging many Vermonters for less than gigabit speeds.
A statewide engineered design for publicly funded fiber infrastructure, in order to adhere to the statutory policy and goals found in 30 VSA 202c, must be capable of supporting broadband competition from multiple providers. These networks must also be reliable, designed to support “public safety grade” communication circuits, radio and cellular backhaul for ubiquitous wireless services. These are all statutory goals yet they are all also being ignored by the Vermont Community Broadband Board, current CUD efforts and lawmakers’ and the governor’s lax “oversight.”.
Clearly, Vermont should be pursuing the most cost-effective and affordable strategy for use of these one-time federal dollars and, at the same time, to reach all of our statutory goals, while also working within the limits of the available $200 million to $300 million.
We also need to be investing in training a workforce for long-term good jobs for Vermonters, a workforce development strategy for our electric utilities, fiber installers, tower climbers and others, and we should plan to support union wage jobs for the construction, maintenance and, most importantly, the emergency repair of “our” fiber after inevitable storm damage.
Who should own all the new fiber? Who can best install, maintain and repair it? The obvious answer to this question is the regulated pole-owning utilities under contract with a public funding agency and regulated by the Public Utility Commission. Not a bunch of well-meaning but amateur volunteers, and not the existing monopolists, even if they are in self-serving so-called “partnerships” with CUDs.
The fiber should be built, owned and maintained by the electric utilities, funded with both public and ratepayer dollars. In exchange for a small share of the fiber strands needed for grid management and a small share of the revenues for maintenance and use of the poles, the utilities benefit too, such that after severe storms, the skilled personnel will already be on the clock, on the ground, in Vermont, and in their trucks.
This is the only way to assure that Vermont will be ready to rapidly restore service to those areas most affected by unavoidable severe weather events and already have agreed-upon, preplanned priorities and protocols necessary to first restore wireless communications supporting public safety, emergency calling and response.
The management and bookkeeping tasks of other competitors or public safety leasing all of this new open access fiber, built with public funds, might best be handled by the Vermont Broadband Board, successor in interest to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority and, later, the connectivity division at the Department of Public Service.
This must be done in a manner that does not waste valuable fiber capacity or pole space, or result in three or more sets of cell towers and small cell hardware still only delivering spotty and incomplete wireless carrier coverage, while continuing to leave too many dangerous dead zones with no cellular service at all.
Resilience and infill of mobile wireless coverage (neutral host, all carriers) must be made a priority in this design process as well as providing near-term, interim wireless broadband coverage to be used by the many Vermonters with no service at all presently, and during the three to five years it may take to complete the fiber buildout across all of Vermont.
This strategy also supports rapid restoration of 4G/LTE cell service and broadband coverage to protect Vermonters’ ability to make emergency calls while line workers are busy repairing electric grid power outages or splicing broken fibers after a severe storm, which might take days or even weeks.
Use existing fiber, right-of-way fees
Utilizing existing fiber is essential whenever and wherever possible to get the job done within the available budget. Vermont’s river corridors are cluttered with abundant (and redundant) fiber, four or five carriers in parallel, fiber that has often been built with public and ratepayer investments, including Consolidated Communications, Velco, Green Mountain Power, VTA fiber, SoverNet (now FirstLight fiber), VTrans fiber, VTel fiber. Yet none of these carriers are now paying a fee for the use of the public highway right-of-way, ignoring a statutory requirement to do so pursuant to 19 VSa 26a.
All of this existing fiber must be inventoried, located, identified and evaluated for its leasing costs and resiliency application in designing long-haul and middle-mile resilient ring architectures. We need not — indeed, should not — design and build any new fiber over top of existing spans where available and affordable fibers are already in place.
Resolving the ongoing statutory violations of 19 VSA Section 26a, under which all broadband providers are supposed to be paying annual fees for the use of the public right-of-way, is both timely and essential. The governor has apparently told his cabinet to simply ignore the law, as happened under Gov. Douglas with the 10-year telecommunications plan, pretending this to be a cost savings or an avoidable tax.
This right-of-way fee statute should no longer be ignored, nor should it be recklessly repealed at this preliminary stage absent a thorough, independent revenue potential analysis and study of alternatives for raising needed funds to support essential public benefit services. The taxing of utility infrastructure is long overdue for comprehensive reform and simplification.
Monetizing the use of the public right-of-way may be the most important strategy for benefits to accrue to the public in exchange for the private benefits gained by for-profit enterprise. The resulting funds are clearly now necessary to support Enhanced 911, regional consolidated public safety dispatch, public access television, telecommunication services for the deaf, telecommunications relay services, translation and other Universal Service Fund obligations.
The Enhanced 911 system should logically include not only answering 911 emergency calls but also the ability to sustain the radio dispatching systems and services required to support calls all the way through to the First Responders, both while en route to an emergency as well as the emerging safety benefits of 4G/LTE broadband wireless services supporting emergency responses.
Extending the current 2.4% universal service charge on retail telecommunications services to also include broadband services is another option. Vermont’s Universal Service Fund was created before the passage of the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act and the Vermont Universal Service Fund is used to support Enhanced 911 services, threading the needle of two qualified exemptions found in the act’s footnotes.
So these three revenue sources — federal funding for building shared, open access fiber infrastructure; the right-of-way usage charge; and extending the universal service charge on telecommunications, currently at 2.4%, to broadband services — are the most expedient ways to get the fiber built in the most cost-effective manner, and soonest, to make the Enhanced 911 system solvent and to create a sustainable funding source for public benefit uses, including public media and consolidated dispatch improvements.
Will the current leadership in both the legislative and executive branches seize this opportunity?
