Snail Mail survey sent, online survey to follow

Wed, 04/29/2015 - 11:39

Lynda Clancy

Rockport Town Manager Rick Bates at his office desk, where the hookup to fiber cable last year is now providing him with Internet download and upload speeds of 796 megabytes per second. (Photo by Lynda Clancy)

Rockport Town Office rates of transmission

The rates of transmission in one Rockport home, hooked to the Internet via telephone wire and Ethernet cable to router/modem.

The Three Ring Binder is the result of a 2009 effort by Maine state officials, representatives of the University of Maine System and Maine telecommunications companies to determine how Maine could leverage federal stimulus dollars to enhance broadband access.

Rockport Town Office rates of transmission

The rates of transmission in one Rockport home, hooked to the Internet via telephone wire and Ethernet cable to router/modem.

In April, Rockport, Rockland and Owls Head signed a contract with Boston-based telecom and IT company Tilson Technology to investigate how to provide town citizens with high-speed Internet. With a public policy push, these communities have decided they want to see substantial improvements in how local residents and business owner connect to the Internet. To these towns, is a matter of economic health.

Last week, Tilson mailed a survey to 400 random households and businesses in the three towns, and town offices hope all those who receive the snail mail surveys will take the time to fill them out and send them back.

This will be followed next by an online survey in which all citizens will be invited to participate. Stay tuned for details about the online survey.

“Broadband isn’t 10 megabits up or down,” said Rockport Town Manager Rick Bates. “It’s 25 up or down. We are trying to compete in a global market, yet we have Internet speeds in the bottom 10 percent of the country, with 3 up and 3 down.”

It is a refrain uttered throughout the state for the past few years, as momentum builds for Internet infrastructure upgrades.

Sit with Bates at the Rockport Town Office and he will show you what he means. His desktop computer is connected via Ethernet cable to the high speed fiber network that was extended into Rockport Village last August, when the town commissioned (total cost, $75,000, with $30,000 of that funded by taxpayers) a spur from a line that runs down Route 1 from Belfast to Rockland.

He will pull up a site that road-tests any computer’s upload and download speed to the Internet. In this case, it’s Comcast’s test site. Within a few seconds, his connectivity speed is assessed at approximately 800 megabits per second (mbps). For the average consumer, that means that a site such as CNN.com — loaded with with stories, photos and video — loads in a fast few seconds.

By contrast, one-half mile away, at a Rockport residence, upload and download speeds using one of the area’s service providers, and hooked in via Ethernet cable to a modem/router, are 1.52 mbps and .35 Mbps, respectively.

The residential Rockport connection is well below what the FCC labels today as “broadband.”

In January, the Federal Communications Commission changed the definition of broadband and raised the minimum download speeds needed from 4Mbps (what is was in 2010) to 25Mbps. The he minimum upload speed under the new definition increased from 1Mbps to 3Mbps.

With the FCC change, the number of U.S. households without broadband access suddenly tripled, illustrating that the country lags well behind other countries in Internet capacity. Moreover, the FCC said, “a significant digital divide remains between urban and rural America: Over half of all rural Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service.”

The Three Ring Binder and what Midcoast municipalities want

In 2010, with $25.4 million from the federal government in stimulus money and $7.6 in private funds, the privately owned Maine Fiber Company began building the Three Ring Binder, a network of strung fiber optic cable that loops around the state to rural and economically disadvantaged areas.

The 1,100-mile network passed through more than 100 communities, theoretically to offer broadband to 110,000 households, 600 community anchor institutions, and a number of last-mile service providers.

The public-private partnership was intended to provide 100 Mbps broadband speeds for University of Maine campuses, community colleges, government facilities, public safety departments, the state’s research and education network, and rural healthcare clinics and hospitals.

The goal was to encourage economic development to in Western and Eastern Maine, northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and on to New Brunswick.

The Three Ring Binder is a “Middle Mile” network, meaning it does not go to each home or business building, fire station or hospital.

Those connections are known as “Last Mile” but since the Binder was built, few “Last Miles” have been created.

In 2014, Rockport ran a spur of fiber from the Binder to Rockport Village to service Maine Media workshops, the Rockport Public Library and the Rockport Town Office.

That left town leaders looking to the next step, which is to see how the rest of Rockport could be connected to broadband.

Bates, who has avidly been blazing a trail in the Midcoast to use the public fiber network known as the 3-Ring Binder (see sidebar), has joined a national effort to get communities working on a higher-functioning Internet. He traveled to California last year to talk with other like-minded municipal leaders, and on April 29 was taking his message to Bangor, speaking to a group of interested business owners.

On April 16, he testified before the Maine Legislature’s Joint Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology in favor of LDs 1063 (An Act To Promote Community Broadband Planning and Strengthen Economic Opportunity throughout Maine) and 1185 (An ActTo Establish the Municipal Gigabit Broadband Network Access Fund).

Bates said: "Our world is changing faster than any of us can imagine and all of the old rules of economic development are quickly going out the window, because of our ability to be connected. We have seen a dramatic shift in the way people work. No longer are people tied to working in the town where the factory is. In the words of Senator Angus King, 'the Internet allow us to work where we live rather than live where we work.’.... The Internet is critical to making that possible, and it has to be an Internet that is not just fast, but blazing fast. Mediocre is not good enough for us to be competitive.'

"Maine Media workshop was able to stay in Rockport and be competitive because of the fiber we installed through a joint effort with them, Maine REN and the town. Dream Local, a Rockland small business Internet marketing and social media business, chose the location and building they are in, because of its proximity to the three ring binder and the availability of fiber and high speed Internet. These businesses need blazing fast, reliable Internet."

The issue is no long technical, he said, but one of public policy.

In the meantime, Rockland, a city of 8,000, has been on a similar path to increase broadband to all citizens. When the city hired its new community development director, Audra Caler Bell, a few months ago, the Council topped her task list with improving Internet capabilities.

“Prior to my arrival to the city, they [the Rockland City Council] had been interested in doing a study, and part of my work plan is to increase broadband,” she said, April 28.

At the end of February, a handful of towns gathered in Rockland to talk about working with Tilson on a joint study. Regionalizing the study would drop the rates for each town, and the representatives were to return to their respective communities to see if their selectmen approved pursuing the idea. Some declined participating given the price of the study, said Bates. Others, including Camden, have yet to get the study proposal before their selectmen.

In the end, it was the three municipalities — Owls Head, Rockland and Rockport — that said yes.

Words to know

Broadband: high-capacity transmission technique using a wide range of frequencies that enables a large number of messages to be simultaneously communicated. Broadband includes several high-speed transmission technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fiber, Wireless, Satellite, Broadband over Powerlines (BPL).

In January 2015, the Federal Communications Commission changed the definition of broadband and raised the minimum download speeds needed from 4Mbps to 25Mbps, and the minimum upload speed from 1Mbps to 3Mbps.

With the FCC change, the number of U.S. households without broadband access tripled, and illustrated that the country lagged behind other countries in Internet capacity. Moreover, the FCC said, “a significant digital divide remains between urban and rural America: Over half of all rural Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service.”

Download and Upload: To download is to consume (move files from the Web to a personal computer, watch movies, etc.). To upload is to produce/send (photos, files, video) to the Web. To analysts, the uploading capacity of the Internet is even more important than the downloading, because it reflects economic productivity.

Mbps: Megabits per second. Not to be confused with megabyte (MB). A megabit is an increment used to measure download speed. Megabyte refers to a file’s size. A megabit is one-eighth the size of a megabyte, “meaning that to download a 1MB file in one second you would need a connection of 8Mbps.

Then there are the gigabytes (GB) and a gigabit (Gb), with the same ratio. A gigabyte is eight times larger than a gigabit.

Rockport’s Select Board voted unanimously in favor of securing the study, as did Rockland’s City Council. On April 21, Owls Head held a special town meeting to vote on the proposed study expenditure, with 13 citizens voting in favor, and four against.

The subsequent $52,000 contract calls for Rockport and Rockland to each pay $22,000, and Owls Head, $8,000.

In return, Tilson is to conduct a stakeholder survey to assess the existing broadband availability in the region.

Tilson will also conduct an inventory of existing telecom assets; produce high-level network designs of varying levels of connectivity at varying costs; estimate operating costs; produce an overview of business model operations, potential operating structures, risk allocation and financing options; produce an analysis of economic benefits to the municipalities; and write a final report.

That report is due back to the municipalities by late summer or early fall, said Bell.

“The Rockport Select Board has been very supportive of moving fiber forward and getting broadband to every residence in town,” said Bates. “They want Rockport residents to have the best connection that they can. This is so that you can work from Rockport like you are working in Boston or New York City, but have the quality of life that is here.”

He said Maine is trying to compete in a global market but has Internet speeds in the bottom 10 percent of the country.

Downloading, he said, represents primarily the consumer end of the Internet traffic, with movies and videos and files. Uploading is the act of producing and selling.

“Downloading is so you can buy stuff,” said Bates. “Uploading is so you can produce and send it out.”

He cited the town of Sandy, Ore., population, 10,000, as an example of a municipality that took matters in its own hands in ensuring broadband to residents.

SandyNet, the city’s public broadband utility, eschewed a wireless network in favor of a fiber optic network, and in 2014, the city council there issued a revenue bond for 7.5 million dollars to improve and expand its network.

Sandy, Ore., now offers 100 mbps service throughout the municipalities to accounts for $39 a month.

Those kinds of details are what Rockland, Rockport and Owls Head hope to obtain through the Tilson study. If fiber is extended toward the smaller Rockport neighborhoods of West Rockport, Rockville, Simonton Corner and Glen Cove, how much might that cost to the consumer?

According to Bates, such a scenario would resemble the financial structure of a sewer system, meaning it is a closed system and funded by users only, not the taxpayer at large.

He said Sandy, Ore., anticipated a 35-40 percent “take-rate” for its closed fiber system, and bonded for that number. But citizens are signing up at a faster clip, and as of now, 52 percent of the town residents are climbing onboard SandyNet.

“There is an untapped need for additional speed,” said Bates.

The sorting out of private Internet Service Providers, who can rent the fiber (at $14 a hook-up), with the owner of the pipe, which is the town, is a business discussion that comes later. For the present, the Tilson study is to prepare and distribute surveys, create a network design, and produce a financial and economic benefits model.

“If we don’t get why this is important, we won’t do anything,” said Bates. “For us here in Rockport, we are going to move forward no matter what.”