Whip City Fiber has big plans to serve more residents in its hometown of Westfield, Massachusetts, and is already helping some of its neighbors as they seek better connectivity.

Expanding At Home

In February, Westfield City Council unanimously approved the municipal utility’s request for a $15 million bond to fund expansion to more areas of the city. Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) connectivity is currently available to approximately 15 percent of the city. The additional funds will allow Westfield Gas + Electric (WG+E) to expand the network to about 70 percent of the community, or about 10,000 additional households. WG+E is planning the expansion on a two-year timeline.

As in the past, WG+E will use the “fiberhood” approach, giving priority to neighborhoods with the highest interest. They will also consider seasonal practicalities and the locations of existing infrastructure. According to their announcement, they will be installing overhead services this month and will begin underground installation when the ground thaws.

As Westfield’s FTTH has grown piece by piece, they’ve had opportunities to work out the rough patches and determine what challenges communities in western Massachusetts may face when they build out Internet networks. Now, WG+E is reaching out to other communities who are looking for guidance.

State Finally Releases Funding

A change in recent policy from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) has enabled Westfield and it's neighbors to have a little more control over their telecommunications future.

Since 2014, MBI has grappled with how it intends to distribute $50 million worth of state funding designated for communities in need of better connectivity. After several changes in policy, the agency required rural towns to get approval from MBI for business plans and to work with the organization before they could receive funding. The agency and the state have been widely criticized for its heavy-handed, yet slow-footed approach.

Cambridge Community Television - February 8, 2017

Cambridge Broadband Matters: The Future of Community Broadband

Hosted by Pat McCormick

See the original story here.

Berkshire Eagle - February 4, 2017

Eagle Eye Team Report: Broadband expansion languishes in Berkshires

Written by Larry Parnass & Patricia LeBoeuf

Nearly 10 years ago, Gov. Deval Patrick came to Becket with a promise of information-age equity: broadband internet service across Western Massachusetts. By 2011, he said.

And yet the “digital divide” persists.

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OUTSIDE RECOMMENDATIONS

Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has studied the issue nationally from his base in Minnesota.

Governments can and should build their own broadband networks, he said.

“Getting high-quality internet is not the first time we’ve done this. We electrified the entire country and did it in a fiscally responsible manner,” he said.

Rather than start with a middle mile, Mitchell thinks Massachusetts should have fostered last-mile connections with alternative ways of connecting to distant trunk lines on the internet. And when it comes to local town networks, he believes people should think of what’s best locally.

...

Read the full story here.

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Berkshire Eagle - February 6, 2017

Inside the broadband meltdown: WiredWest retools after losing faceoff with MBI

Written by Larry Parnass

A broadband vision for the Berkshires crashed and burned one afternoon in December 2015.

A year later, people still poke through the wreckage. They want to understand why the Massachusetts Broadband Institute halted its long-running alliance with WiredWest, a nonprofit, grassroots cooperative that had signed up dozens of towns to build and operate a shared internet network.

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MUTUAL BENEFITS

Mount Washington has selected a firm to handle the design and construction services for its planned Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.

Mount Washington

This past summer, the community received word that it would receive a $230,000 grant from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI), the state agency set up to administer federal and state funds for broadband network deployment. Mount Washington had already obtained special permission from the state legislature to proceed with a network sans a Municipal Light Plant (MLP). In Massachusetts, municipalities are required to establish MLPs to operate and manage any publicly owned Internet network. Because Mount Washington is so small, however, they felt creating another administrative entity would be an undue burden; state legislators agreed and created an exception for them in statute.

This past spring, they released a Request for Proposals (RFP) to locate a firm for design and construction.

An Important Step

The town of 150 full-time residents is located in the far southwest corner of the state and much of the community is covered by forest. The Mount Washington State Forest, the Mount Everett State Reservation, and the Taconic Mountains, give the community its nickname: “The Town Among The Clouds.” Incumbents have shied away from investing in Mount Washington; even plain old telephone service is bad there. 

The town considered participating in the Wired West broadband cooperative, but eventually chose to pursue their own network. Mount Washington’s publicly owned network will connect to MassBroadband 123, the statewide middle mile network. The network will also need to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to offer Internet access via the new infrastructure.

In the press release, announcing the decision to move on to the next step:

It’s no small feat to plan, deploy, and operate a municipal citywide Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network, but communities are doing it. We’ve put together a Citywide Municipal FTTH Networks list and a map, with quick facts at your fingertips. If your community is considering such an investment, this list can offer a starting point on discovering similarly situated locations to study.

The list is divided by state and each state heading offers a description of any barriers that exist and a link to the statute in question. Under each community, we also included relevant links such as to the provider’s website, coverage on MuniNetworks.org, and reports or resources about the network.

We used four basic criteria to put a community on our list and map:

• The network must cover at least 80% of a city.
• A local government (city, town, or county) owns the infrastructure.
• It is a Fiber-to-the-Home network.
• It is in the United States. 

Share the list far and wide and if you know of a community network that meets our criteria that we missed, please let us know. Contact H. Trostle at htrostle@ilsr.org to suggest additions.

Charlemont, Massachusetts, is asking local businesses and residents to complete a survey to help their Broadband Committee as they move ahead with plans to improve connectivity. At a November information session, the Committee announced that the town would investigate options and pursue plans to deploy a municipal network. They plan to take advantage of state and federal funding administered by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI).

Plans Change

The western town of about 1,200 people intended to work with WiredWest, the broadband cooperative that planned to build a regional network, but MBI interfered with the plans and revoked funding from the group early in 2016. MBI objected to the WiredWest plan to operate as a cooperative of Municipal Light Plants (MLPs), the entity in each community responsible for managing its municipal network. You can read more details about the situation in an April 2016 report from the Berkman Center’s David Talbot, Waide Warner, and Susan Crawford.

Since then, MBI has created criteria for local communities to meet before they can access funding to build their own municipal networks. A number of local communities that once considered membership in WiredWest are moving forward and releasing RFPs, including Alford, Egremont, and Mount Washington. Before Charlemont gets that far, however, they want to find out exactly what the need is in their community.

Looking To Leverett

Cape Cod is known for tourism, not for connectivity. The nonprofit OpenCape aims to change that. In In a recent Provincetown, Massachusetts morning radio show, Provincetown Town Manager David Panagore spoke with Dr. Michael Goodman of UMass Dartmouth and Steve Johnston of OpenCape to dig into the idea of better connectivity in the region and how OpenCape can make that happen.

Connectivity for the Local Economy

The first guest on "Town Talk" is Dr. Michael Goodman from UMass Dartmouth. He describes how broadband has become an essential utility for the local economy. Goodman's specific examples underscore the importance of Internet service for small businesses providing customer service. 

Lack of connectivity slows down everything, from sending files to running credit cards. High-speed Internet service from community networks has been a major boon to a number of towns. We’ve compiled many examples on our Economic Development page.

Open Cape’s Crowd Fiber Campaign

The Executive Director of OpenCape, Steve Johnston, joins the show to discuss the role of OpenCape in efforts to improve connectivity for homes and businesses. OpenCape is the nonprofit that built a regional network to many schools, libraries, and public institutions throughout Cape Cod. 

The nonprofit began a campaign this past summer to show how many residents need high-speed Internet access. To learn more about the OpenCape Crowd Fiber campaign, check out the Community Broadband Bits Podcast episode #215.

You can also listen the show at WOMR.org.

Alford, Massachusetts, located along the western border of Massachusetts, recently released a Request for Proposals (RFP) for fiber optic network design and contractors; the community wants to deploy a Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. Deadline for proposals is December 21, 2016.

A Long Journey To Now

Alford is home to approximately 500 residents and has pursued better connectivity since the early 2000s, when it first approached the incumbents. As is often the case, national providers continued to pass by Alford over the years leaving them with old, unreliable technology. During 2012 and 2013, the community took the necessary steps and voted to create a Municipal Light Plant (MLP), the entity that manages publicly owned networks in Massachusetts. Since then, they have formed a broadband committee, conducted surveys of local interest and requirements, and examined financial models. 

In 2015, the town approved a measure to borrow $1.6 million to cover the expenses to deploy a FTTP network. The Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI), the state agency tasked with administering more than $71 million in federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and state funds, informed the MLP Board that the town will receive approximately $290,000 in grants funds.

The Alford MLP’s November update reports that the community has made significant progress on make-ready work to prepare utility poles:

The MLP has now come to an agreement with Verizon and National Grid about the extent of “make-ready” work required to prepare the poles to accept fiber. In the next few weeks the MLP will make payments to the utilities, clearing the way for the work to begin. The MLP has no control over the timing of the work, which will probably begin around year- end and which can take up to six months to complete. 

The Project

In this week's Community Connections, Christopher chats with Anne Schweiger, Broadband and Digital Equity Advocate for the city of Boston. Schweiger talks about the challenges that Boston faces, including a lack of competition and adoption of broadband in the home. She talks about the importance of "baking good broadband practice" into building codes for cities.

In February, 2016 the Boston Globe editorial board came out in support of a municipal network. 

Boston has its own conduit network and significant fiber assets, but residents and businesses must seek service from large private providers.