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Community Broadband Network in Braintree Massachusetts Voted Best Internet Provider
With about 1,500 Internet customers solely from word-of-mouth advertising, BELD staff looked to expand the offerings from its HFC network. In 2000, a cable television plan and $3.5 million bond issue were approved at Town meeting. State-of-the-art digital cable service was launched before the end of that year, and by the end of 2001, BELD was serving 4,000 cable and nearly 3,000 Internet customers.As a measure of their success, citizens just voted BELD Broadband the top ISP of the area for the 3rd year in a row ...
The town also voted the department Best Cable TV Provider (for the second year) and Best Phone Service in 2010, casting votes via BestOfSurveys.com with Market Surveys of America, an independent survey company and member of the Better Business Bureau.You can follow BELD Broadband on twitter.
Wired West Decides on Coop Structure
“You often hear that it is too expensive to bring fiber-optic lines to every home, business and institution in a rural area," said Webb, who lives in the remote southern Berkshire town of Monterey. “But that only means it’s too expensive for the business model of private-sector companies who have to show profitability in a very short period. It is not too too expensive if it is done by the communities themselves on a basis that does not have to meet those market demands."Wired West has announced a decision on the difficult issue of governance structure. They are going to be a public co-operative, comprised of the member towns. Now the member towns will have to approve the structure and the organization will move forward on the planning necessary to develop, finance, and build their broadband network.
In Massachusetts, Wired West Builds Momentum
Once the non-profit has been formed, financing options would have to be identified, and preliminary design and cost estimate work would start. None of the cost of the project would be borne by the towns, Webb said. Ongoing maintenance cost and debt service payments would come from money paid to the agency by the service providers, added Andrew Michael Cohill, president of Design Nine, a consultancy hired to help WiredWest through the next phase of development.A previous article discussed a cost estimate of the network and how much money residents send outside their community for service.
Monica Webb, a spokesperson for WiredWest, said that a consultant who met last year with representatives from Mount Washington and 10 other towns in southern Berkshire County estimated the cost of building a fiber-optic network for that region at $27 million. But, Webb said, the consultant calculated that the roughly 12,000 households in the region were already paying an average of $125 a month for Internet and other telecommunication services – an amount that adds up to $18 million a year that people “are putting in an envelope and sending outside of your region.”The most recent announcement relating to the project discusses how a recent federal broadband stimulus grant to the Massachusetts Broadband Institute will aid the Wired West network.
This will enable a robustmiddle-mile network to be built by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) in Western and North-Central Massachusetts that will serve 123 communities.
Warwick, Massachusetts Builds Community Wireless Network
We know about a USDA program meant to bring broadband to rural America. Our information is that most of the money has gone to suburban communities in Texas, and we don’t have a professional grant administrator to chase down any money that might be left. We’re aware that the Massachusetts governor just signed a $40 million act establishing the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, to figure out how to bring broadband to unserved and underserved towns. We’re also aware that the money will go to vendors to develop regional systems and we don’t have the patience to wait the two or three years it will take for anyone to get around to thinking about maybe serving us.Ultimately, the City was able to lend itself the money:
As it has turned out, we didn’t need to borrow — town financial officers found the funds without going to the bank for them. We got the necessary permits from the owners of two towers here, bought the equipment, got a couple of people trained to install the equipment, and turned on our first customers in March, 2009.Between a local mountain and available cell tower, the topology apparently fits a fixed-wireless approach (at least for a significant part of the population).
Wired West Plans Muni Open Access Fiber in Western Massachusetts
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On Opposite Coasts, People Organize for Broadband
Norton, Mass, Building Publicly Owned Institutional Network
Town Manager James Purcell said the main infrastructure that will be installed will be the beginning, and likened the expenditure to paying for the installation of a major sewer line with stubs to various buildings.
Santa Monica and South Hadley Expand Networks
TMCNET interviews Jory Wolf - the CIO of Santa Monica's Information Systems Department - about their application for broadband stimulus funds. Santa Monica has long used its publicly owned network to expand broadband access in the community.
Our Santa Monica City Net and City WiFi (News - Alert) project will provide the equipment and connections required to expand the City’s free WiFi service that delivers Internet access to the public at our libraries, open space areas, community centers, homeless shelter, senior centers and animal shelters. In addition, our project will provide a connection to over 200 ISPs to obtain affordable broadband options to local businesses and increase the competitiveness of our country’s preeminent post-production companies and intellectual exports located in Santa Monica, Calif.
South Hadley, a small town in Massachusetts, may expand its modest fiber network (currently connecting schools, police, and town hall to others in town. Its municipal power company is evaluating options.
Baltimore City Paper ran a column discussing the Monticello, MN, city-owned network and the attacks against it by TDS Telecom. This accounting of the history has some errant details, but I found it fascinating how far the Monticello story has spread.
Boston vs. Verizon
Menino is right to insist that telecommunication companies pay their fair share of taxes. In Boston, the exemption shifts more than $5 million a year onto the property tax bills of homeowners, say city officials. But tensions between Verizon and the mayor can be costly in many ways. City cable providers Comcast and RCN, for example, don’t offer the speedier fiber-optic connections into customers’ homes available from Verizon in 98 Massachusetts cities and towns. The new and faster broadband speeds - both downstream and upstream - offered by Verizon to Internet customers therefore remain beyond the reach of Bostonians, as do FiOS-related incentives on products such as mini netbooks and camcorders. Cable and Internet competition is alive and well in the suburbs, but flat in Boston.Verizon has previously threatened to withhold its investments in states that do not sufficiently deregulate -- after turning its back on the New England region by offloading its customers on the totally unprepared Fairpoint company, Verizon pushed franchise "reform" in Massachusetts. Franchise "reform" is when states agree to preempt local communities that selfishly want to regulate the quality of service offered by providers - things like requiring some local channels and thresholds for customer service. As Karl Bode noted in the link above:
While these bills are promoted as a magic elixir that will bring competition and lower TV prices to a region, when people go back to investigate whether these bills actually helped anybody (which is amusingly rare), data indicates that TV prices increased anyway and consumers got the short end of the stick.