by, Matt La France

I decided to swing by ECfiber.net’s site the other day to see what was new and this is what I see.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I’m starting to feel like this is becoming my personal issue, but let me get on my soapbox for a moment and go over a few of the points made on the ecfiber.net site:

“Fiber means phone, cable television, and very fast Internet. This network would bring not only Internet, but also phone service and cable television to every home in town. This provides competition with both Verizon and Comcast, both of whom have shown very little interest in providing rural areas with broadband services.”

This is a mouthful right here. We are talking several discrete unique and undeniable benefits. The first of which is speed.

Fiber supports higher data transfer over greater distances than copper wires. There is a reason why major network backbones are fiber optic cable. Glass and cannot conduct electricity and will not corrode. Fiber is immune to virtually all kinds of interference and will not create ground loops of any kind.

This project is town-owned. That means that big telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon would no longer have a stranglehold on our broadband access.

This article from May 2008 talks about how Fairpoint recently bought Verizon’s DSL and landline networks in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. In Maine their 911 systems malfunctioned nearly a half-dozen times in only a few months. Verizon got a $600 million tax-write-off and eradicating more than a billion in debt in the deal. Fairpoint went from 300,000 landline customers to nearly 2 million in addition to a lot of debt. Fairpoint’s first quarter earnings dropped by 34%.

We don’t have to watch helplessly while these companies offer substandard service for high prices and making a killing for themselves or flounder in debt unable to make upgrades or provide the service they promise. We can empower ourselves with a high quality network that really reaches every home not just the ones that are convenient.

“The interlocal agreement requires that the service be made available to everyone in town who wants it. The network would go past every household in town.”

This article talks about how this is already implemented in Burlington VT with positive results.

Even if you already have broadband, this project could benefit not just you, but your town and the other people living here with you. The local economy and that of your neighbors will be effected. The digital divide (the divide between internet haves and have-nots) that is opening up between rural and non-rural areas could become a non issue in the state of Vermont if every town implemented this project. It’s a fact that I’ve written about in our newsletter that high speed internet access can have social and economic benefits especially for lower income families and this project could make that access available and more affordable.

I think it’s a shame that there is not more community response to this project here in Randolph.

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