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đź”’Growth engine: Faster broadband seen as essential for Maine’s economy

Fletcher Kittredge, CEO of GWI, at the broadband provider's data center in Portland. The data center stores GWI's network, telecommunication and server equipment. PHOTO / TIM GREENWAY
By Lori Valigra

Nowadays, if your office Internet connection fails, even briefly, all work grinds to a halt. But only 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case. IBM Selectric typewriters continued to drum out business letters and dial-up phones still could reach the outside world.The Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, disrupted the insular world of […]

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Telecom timeline

1971: Internet starts
1991: World Wide Web goes live
1993: Mosaic graphical browser stimulates web use
1994: Biddeford Internet Corp. (dba as GWI) starts
1995: Microsoft launches Internet Explorer browser; Amazon.com starts online shopping
1996: Telecommunications Act of 1996 (includes the Internet in broadcasting and spectrum allotment)
1997: Bill Clinton’s inauguration is live on the Internet; first news blogs are introduced
2000: Internet bubble in the early 2000s spawns thousands of start-up companies, many of which later fail; cell phone technology goes viral
2002: TV standard changes from analog to digital; satellite radio starts
2004: Broadband reaches half of U.S. home
2007: Presidential debates on YouTube
2011: President Barack Obama uses Twitter and Facebook to promote his 2012 reelection campaign
2012: Maine’s Three Ring Binder network is completed
2014: Rockport announces Maine’s first municipal gigabit fiber optic network
Sources: Fletcher Kittredge/GWI, Indiana Dept. of Education, Wikipedia

Fletcher Kittredge: A Maine Internet pioneer

GWI CEO Fletcher Kittredge started his Internet career in 1984 in Cambridge, Mass., at a private laboratory called Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where he focused on a defense distribution contract for the Internet. In 1993, when the Mosaic web browser — credited as the first graphical browser, hit the market, Kittredge, who says he never felt at home in Cambridge, saw an opportunity to return to his home state of Maine.
There also was plenty of opportunity to help form Maine’s Internet, as he says there were virtually no Internet service providers then. The communications infrastructure was made of copper wire rather than today’s fiber optics, and Internet access was through regular phone lines, also called dial-up Internet access, using a square box called a modem.
“We still didn’t know what Internet service would look like,” says Kittredge. “We thought it would be small and local [to Biddeford], but almost immediately it expanded to Portland. Then in 1997 we went statewide.”
In the early days, he recalls, Internet service was almost entirely residential. In 1996, faster broadband speeds were available via cable TV modems from Casco Cable, which is now Comcast. That’s when big customers started using the Internet.
“As dial-up went away, 65% of the Internet was to business,” he says. “Email was really big in the early days of the Internet. Now it has died down, and Facebook and Twitter are active.” LISTSERVs, email lists and other software helped groups of people organize.
Kittredge says broadband started to take off as early as 1996, but it really took five to six years to really bloom, and then the Internet bubble came in the early 2000s.
One big change nationally came with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which for the first time included the Internet in broadcasting and spectrum allotment and allowed for media cross-ownership. “Deregulation was the primary result of the Telecommunication Act [for us],” says Fletcher. “We got into the telephone [service] business about eight years later.”
An even bigger difference resulting from the act was the reconsolidation of the telecommunications providers. Kittredge explains that 20 years ago, there were 20 cable companies in Maine. “Today there’s one [big one], and it’s not a good thing,” he says, adding that Time Warner Cable has a 92% market share in Maine. “Deregulation ultimately led to a situation where large telephone companies had the freedom to move out of Maine.”
Digital subscriber line, or DSL, technology was available from the telephone company to provide faster speeds in the early 2000s, and later in the decade Internet via cable TV lines became more pervasive. GWI is an Internet service wholesaler to cable TV companies and owns some lines in places throughout the state.
With the recent addition of a gigabit Internet in Rockland, a project in which GWI was a partner, “Towns feel the need to do it themselves,” he says. That’s especially true of towns like Sanford, which is considering a municipal fiber network because the Three Ring Binder does not go there.
GWI has grown to $17 million in revenues this year, is profitable and has 65 employees.
Going forward, Kittredge foresees a day when communications products will be so advanced, pervasive and ingrained in society that people may not know whether they are on a conference call or actually in a room with the other party. “We are nowhere near the end of this,” he says. “I expect driverless cars in five to 10 years and remote telehealth.”
— LORI VALIGRA

Rural Maine: Internet under the stars

Pulling into the local library’s parking lot at 6 a.m. one frigid winter day — the local Internet cafĂ© didn’t open for a couple more hours — I didn’t hold much hope that the wireless router would be turned on. But my heart lifted at the sight of exhaust steam, dimmed headlights and the telltale rectangles of laptop screen light inside several other cars already sucking up the library’s connection to the outside world.
I wondered how many of them were clearing out emails of singing cats so the rest of their emails would download sequentially until they saw they were able to respond to their business emails.
The scene reminded me of the late-night drive-in movies our family took in when I was a kid, parked among like-minded individuals, staring at a movie screen and looking up occasionally at the stars. Only that was child’s play, and this was business, or what trying to run a home business was like in the early 2000s in rural Maine.
At the time, I was using something called “tethered broadband,” which no longer exists, and for good reasons. It was faster than dial-up over my landline phone, but required using a special connection device between my laptop computer and my flip-top cell phone to access the Internet at still-slow cell phone speeds. At the time, Verizon’s landline service (now FairPoint) did not provide Internet to the willywacks where I lived part-time (the rest of the time was in Massachusetts), nor did Time Warner or anyone else with faster than dial-up speeds.
So if someone emailed a high-resolution photo, a large document, or a video they found amusing (a trait that runs rampant among my family and friends), my tethered broadband simply froze. To access emails, I had to drive around, either to the nearest Verizon cell tower (my cell phone only gets one bar where I live, and even that involves leaning toward the southwest window of my house and aiming the phone between the trees), or drive around seeking an open Internet café or a library that had left its wireless on. Each option involved about a 12-mile drive.
When I started spending more time in Maine around 2010 and moved here in 2013, that routine broke me. Both the phone company and the cable TV company offered high-speed Internet access, and I chose the latter.
And I found that in rural Maine, there can be more than one happy ending. A recent storm knocked out my Internet service for a day. As on autopilot, I headed for a library several towns away. It was closed, but had the foresight to put tables and chairs outside for such occasions. I sat among the other wireless interlopers, opened my laptop and felt a tinge of nostalgia.
— LORI VALIGRA

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