Making connections | A flurry of proposals to expand Maine's broadband network provokes competition
Photo/David A. Rodgers
Fletcher Kittredge, CEO of GWI in Biddeford
Fletcher Kittredge is so sure of the need for a public/private partnership to deliver expanded broadband service to rural parts of Maine that he has no worries over finding the $6.4 million to make that happen.
Kittredge, CEO of Biddeford-based telecommunications company GWI, told an assembly of business and legislative leaders at an executive forum sponsored by TechMaine last month that he would find the 20% match needed to leverage $32 million in stimulus funds to expand Maine’s broadband network, even if he has to dig deep into his own pockets.
“The state has no money and the university has no money for federal matching funds, so this has to be carried by the private carriers, and a big problem is the lack of trust among the private carriers,” he said at the forum.
GWI’s proposal, which is endorsed by a collaboration of private businesses and public institutions, would build three rings of expanded fiber optic service in northern, Down East and western Maine. It is one of at least five proposals that will be reviewed by the state’s newly created Broadband Strategy Council, which is charged with making recommendations to the federal government on which grants to fund through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The $7 billion available to expand broadband access in unserved and underserved parts of the country has touched off an avalanche of interest. More than 2,200 applications have been received asking for more than seven times the amount of money available, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Agriculture‘s Rural Utilities Service, the agencies overseeing the stimulus awards.
The opportunity to get a piece of the stimulus pie is expected to advance Maine’s timetable for broadband service. But the feds aren’t saying how the pot will be divided, heightening the competition among the private carriers, and underscoring Kittredge‘s observation about trust.
Case in point: No sooner had GWI made details of its application public than FairPoint Communications cried foul. The North Carolina-based telecommunications company took over Verizon’s landline operations this year, in an agreement with state regulators to provide expanded broadband service to rural parts of Maine within five years. It, too, submitted proposals for stimulus money that would expand service to 10,000 households or businesses in Aroostook County and another 9,300 in Washington County within three years — in parts of the state that would not likely get service otherwise, says Peter Nixon, the company’s president. Severin Beliveau, an attorney representing FairPoint, criticized the University of Maine’s endorsement of the GWI proposal in early August, saying that the system’s involvement in the GWI proposal puts the application in direct competition with FairPoint’s proposal. “They are in fact receiving a subsidy from taxpayers, in competing with the private sector,” Beliveau said at the time to Capitol News Service.
The tiff illustrates what’s at stake in the delivery of broadband service throughout Maine. Like telephones and decent roads of 50 years ago, broadband service is considered a necessity in today’s business world — a priority cited by Gov. John Baldacci when he established the ConnectME Authority two years ago to map broadband access throughout the state and promote its development.
Phil Lindley, executive director of ConnectME, was a utilities analyst with the Maine Public Utilities Commission before taking his post with ConnectME. To him, high-speed Internet service is essential for economic development and to allow Maine businesses to compete.
“Today you have to look at the broadband pipeline as a digital highway,” he says. “And access is the on and off ramp to that digital highway.”
He says the lack of high-speed Internet service plagues large and small businesses around the state. A graphic artist in Down East Maine complained to Lindley recently about his troubles with the large format photos he produces that require huge digital files.
“All he had was dial-up,” says Lindley. “He couldn’t post his work on his website, he couldn’t update his projects. He had to copy everything to CD and send it off to clients that way.”
The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor operates with similar constraints, says Lindley, recounting a conversation he had with Jill Goldthwait, the lab’s director of government relations.
“The electron microscopes they use there generate a gazillion bytes of data,” he says, “but it’s cheaper for Jackson Lab to load that data onto a truck and send it to Boston than to use the Internet.”
Which way to go?
Lindley wants to see that change. A logical prelude to expanding service is first mapping the existing network. ConnectME has submitted its own application for stimulus funds from a pool separate from the other proposals — a $3 million request to map the existing network of fiber optic cable throughout the state. The grant would continue the mapping work ConnectME started two years ago, which led to collaborations with private carriers to extend service to rural parts of the state. So far, the state agency has spent $3 million, leveraging another $5 million in three rounds of grants that have extended broadband service to more than 30,000 households.
Oddly, the federal architects of the stimulus fund program for broadband made the money for both mapping and building infrastructure available at the same time, a decision that undermines a coordinated, unified approach in extending service, says Lindley.
“What they should have done nine months ago was extend a notification of funds availability for the maps, with the thought, ‘Let’s do the maps first’ and then at the end of that, extend another NOFA for infrastructure bids,” he says.
As a result, the proposals submitted for the stimulus grants are not coordinated and vary widely in scale and cost. The $37 million FairPoint plan would expand service to rural Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. One $10 million proposal would specifically expand the infrastructure for high-speed Internet service to Houlton, Caribou, Limestone and Danforth, and another, separate $6 million application would expand service in the areas of Eastport, Milbridge and Winter Harbor.
GWI’s proposal, dubbed the Three Ring Binder, calls for expanding the town-to-town connective tissue of the broadband spine, an open-access fiber optic network that all private carriers can use, without any one company getting exclusivity. The project includes expanded broadband service for 10 university campuses, three community colleges, 13 courthouses and 11 county jails among other public users.
Lindley knows of three other Maine proposals awaiting a federal thumbs-up: a project by TDS Telecom to increase service in Somerset County; a plan by Axiom Technologies to expand service in northern Maine; and a state library application to create computer centers within libraries.
Executive summaries of the applications are expected to be made public by the middle of September, says Mark Tolbert, a spokesman at the federal NTIA. Awards are likely to be made in early November and continue through the rest of the year before a second round of funding becomes available in 2010.
Once the applications are available, Maine’s Broadband Strategy Council can get to work. The 11-member council will review the applications and, in collaboration with ConnectME and the governor’s office, make recommendations for which proposals to endorse. Sen. Larry Bliss (D-Cumberland) and Rep. Cynthia Dill (D-Cape Elizabeth) chair that council. They were at last month’s TechMaine forum, asking questions.
Bliss acknowledged the anticipated battle before the council, saying he expects to look for proposals “that complement one another for an overall statewide strategy rather than a pissing contest over who gets funding and who doesn’t.”
Dill spoke of the need to get Maine moving on its broadband infrastructure — a priority for economic development to offset the state’s geographic disadvantage.
“If we can start the build-out, we can make Maine central, rather than the end of the line,” she said.
But increasing access to that bandwidth is a tricky thing. Spines of fiber optic cables crisscross the state through major population centers that roughly parallel I-95. The owners of those networks consider them proprietary and are not obliged to share their locations or capabilities with the PUC or ConnectME. GWI’s Kittredge said disclosure of the location of “dark fiber” — the fiber optic lines that are installed but not activated — is a key component of his company’s plan.
Lindley isn’t sure whether that attitude is shared by other private carriers.
“It certainly is a challenge,” he says of the mistrust among carriers. “There is a tendency not to share and work with a competitor, and I think that will continue to be a challenge.”
Ideally, private carriers would reveal their networks and service capabilities to a central authority, which could then provide a public database of service.
“All I really need to know is at which address, on which street, who does provide broadband service above a certain rate,” Lindley says. “A database that’s searchable, so you can plug in your address and see that Time Warner, Oxford Networks, Red Zone or none of the above provide service. The contact information would be included, so essentially we’re doing the marketing for the carriers. That’s the dream.”
Carol Coultas, Mainebiz editor, can be reached at ccoultas@mainebiz.biz.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments