15 ms·

Vermont proposes providing broadband internet service to all state residents

288 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

geocrasher 6y ago
I wish more states viewed it this way. I think that COVID19 has proven that Internet isn't a luxury, it's a utility that we all need. In a world with online meetings being the way to simply hang out with your friends, those with bad Internet connections are suffering more. It shouldn't be that way.
- noxToken 6y ago
  I have a coworker who basically doesn't participate in meetings. Their connection is so bad that maybe 10% of their sentences are intelligible.
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Some video conferencing providers allow you to call in to a meeting with a landline telephone. I know Zoom does, anyway. No video, obviously, just voice.
votepaunchy 6y ago
Godspeed Vermont. May you have more success than your promised single-payer health care. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform
cure 6y ago
Yay for Vermont, but I hope they give their plan some teeth when the big telcos (who presumably would be doing the work) inevitably do not deliver on their promises. It would be much better if they turn it into the state-wide equivalent of municipal broadband. Maybe that's what they are thinking? The article is very light on details.
mobilefriendly 6y ago
These latest "broadband" efforts look like just another money grab by the same incumbents (Comcast, Frontier, etc) and the same state and federal bureaucracies that have failed to deliver competition and access. Vermont should simply announce full throated support for low-orbit satellite internet, which is under active deployment from SpaceX and also development from Amazon.
- nekbroadband 6y ago
  Absolutely agreed that the same inefficient companies are trying to grab the federal money once again. The difference this time is we have Communications Union Districts in place in many parts of the state that have veto power over proposed broadband projects in their region. As for LEOS internet, the elephant in the room for this technology is vulnerability to solar flares and Kessler syndrome. Long term viability of satellite super constellations is seriously in doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
siegbenn 6y ago
I live in Vermont and I'm tentatively excited about this. Unfortunately, our municipal internet provider in Burlington, VT was financially a disaster [1]. The tax payers put up a bunch of money. Burlington Telecom was mismanaged into defaulting on its debts causing the city's bond rating to fall to nearly junk bond status. It was sold at a loss to a private company. [2] Very disappointing considering how awesome Burlington Telecom is. I currently pay $35 for 1G symmetrical in my apartment building. Hopefully if this statewide project goes through, they don't repeat those mistakes. [1] https://vermontbiz.com/news/2019/march/13/citibank-fully-releases-burlington-335-million-bt-lawsuit https://vermontbiz.com/news/2019/march/13/citibank-fully-rel... (Citibank fully releases Burlington from $33.5 million BT lawsuit) [2] https://www.wcax.com/content/news/The-Burlington-Telecom-saga-and-how-we-got-to-where-we-are-455070453.html https://www.wcax.com/content/news/The-Burlington-Telecom-sag... (Burlington Telecom timeline: How did we get here?)
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The same could be said about Frontier [1] and Windstream [2]. I like that Vermont keeps trying, my internet should be like my water, sewer, and similar local services: a utility. The unemployed can be trained to run fiber, and the Fed is going to keep soaking up muni bonds [3], not much to lose by trying again. Capital is cheap, treat failure as just as cheap. It can be done [4] [5]. But you have to care. You have to build public systems and goods that are loved, because to love them is to want to provide ongoing care for them, and to invest yourself in them (financially and otherwise). [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-r... (EFF: Frontier’s Bankruptcy Reveals Why Big ISPs Choose to Deny Fiber to So Much of America) [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/windstream-isp-with-1-million-customers-files-for-bankruptcy/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/winds... (Windstream, ISP with 1 million customers, files for bankruptcy) [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/27/the-fed-says-it-is-expanding-its-municipal-bond-buying-program.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/27/the-fed-says-it-is-expanding... (CNBC: The Fed says it is expanding its municipal bond buying program) [4] https://muninetworks.org/communitymap https://muninetworks.org/communitymap (US Muni Fiber Map) [5] https://b4rn.org.uk/ https://b4rn.org.uk/ (England: Broadband for the Rural North)
knodi 6y ago
This is great for the people too bad Crapcast will kill this initiative.
eatonphil 6y ago
I've been looking into buying a house and moving to Vermont. The topic of fuller, better internet coverage seems to come up every few years. So I'm a little skeptical to see it now. I'm not sure I'd consider it a blocker to moving there, even if I'm dependent on the internet for work. I'm assuming I'll always be able to lease an office within an hour drive of the house. I wonder how practical satellite options like Viasat are says it gets 12-100Mbps download across Vermont. That's as good as Comcast's consumer broadband gets you in Philly. If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind.
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  Moved to VT in early January from the Boston area, in what was by sheer chance, a very timely move. We rent. We live in a bit of an odd development/area. Think of it as a golf course community minus the golf course: under a dozen homes, low density, and private roads. We quite like it, but it's an unusual arrangement from a utilities standpoint. We have Comcast. The other options were VTEL via satellite and cellular wireless. We struck cellular wireless from the list for reasons we're all well familiar with ("unlimited", caps, speed restrictions, cost). VTEL was going to be complicated because we have a metal roof, among other things. We're told that unofficially we can get line of sight to nearby VTEL infra, but convincing VTEL of this seemed like a lot of work while we were moving. We got ridiculously lucky on begin able to get Comcast. The pole our cable comes off of is literally the last pole with coax on it. In this regard, I suppose I'm replying to you from the actual end of the internet. There is possibly one other house within the radius of the pole that Comcast is wiling to pull a line. That's 300' for a temp line, which they did for us because the ground was frozen and the couldn't bury a line when they did the original install. I don't know if it's longer if they can do a direct bury. The latency and throughput aren't as good as they were in the Boston area, but it's good enough. Zoom calls tend towards blurry, but Netflix and Youtube are certainly serviceable. Instagram videos tend to pause a lot for buffering. Bad websites are apocalyptically bad. Joann.com, for example, is horrendously slow. I'm guessing they never worried too much about e-commerce until quite recently. I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in.
cryptoquick 6y ago
I live in Longmont, Colorado, and we have cheap municipal fiber. 1Gbps, synchronous, $55/mo. Just now: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9466487634.png https://www.speedtest.net/result/9466487634.png Similar speeds on Netflix's fast.com. This is what happens when monopolies have competition they can bully, but not buy.
- bproven 6y ago
  Hello neighbor! Fort Collins, CO checking in - municipal fiber, same service / speeds BUT we do have to pay $5 more per month. Oh well. :) Looks like quite a few other cities in CO are joining us soon..
  - cryptoquick 6y ago
    Very cool! Apparently it costs a bit more now than when I first signed up. Also, they support 10G! I'm already wiring up everything with Cat8 and I'm looking for a 10G Router and a 10G Switch. It's been hard to find just the right one, though. Almost as hard as finding the perfect bento box. I'm looking for a 16-port or 24-port switch, ideally they'd all be 10G, but I could compromise a little on a few being multigig. Also, I'm not really worried about PoE, I don't have anything that could use that yet, and if I ever did, I'd purchase a separate switch, and probably not 10G. Price isn't a major concern, if I can't afford it, I'll just hold off with what I have until I can, and I've never really used a managed network interface, so I'd probably just prefer an unmanaged one. I do need to have a separate subnet for my wireless router set in AP mode, so whatever 10G router I choose, I'd want it to be able to support that. I've been looking into Mikrotik and Ubiquiti, and they don't seem to quite offer exactly what I'm looking for. Cisco might, but their site is... Incredibly difficult to use.
- Keverw 6y ago
  Surprised people with the tinfoil hats aren't worried about the city spying on people with municipal fiber. But kinda neat if the private companies are failing to meet the demand. I think Fiber would help attract startups and also more technical people who care about internet speeds. I wish my area had more incentives for tech and startups, but sounds like that probably won't happen anytime soon. Seen a news report some young guy created a iPhone app and couldn't get funding, so ended up leaving for San Francisco. Seems like some of these areas are doing a major disservice and persuading a entire generation to leave for their inaction by not keeping up with the times. Well I guess that is part of the brain drain problem. I wanted to start a computer club in middle school since the principle announced wanting to start more social clubs and activities, but of course that didn't go anywhere... Well considering funding a fire department and community recreation center is even hard here, I doubt faster internet is a priority. Kinda wonder how many people factor in internet speeds when moving.
kondu 6y ago
I'm always surprised by how bad and expensive the internet providers in the US are. Where I am (think major city in a 3rd world country), I pay about 20 USD a month for 650gb at 150mbps (up and down).
commandlinefan 6y ago
I wonder if this will be used as an excuse to start censoring the internet just as the FCC used "public airwaves" as an excuse to censor broadcast.
thrower123 6y ago
It's really interesting watching the natural experiments that are the northern New England states. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are small, essentially the same founding stock, and yet they go in such radically different directions.
jimhefferon 6y ago
My wife is a VT teacher, in secondary education. Obviously with Covid all students are being educated online. Those who do not have an online are at a quite significant disadvantage. That is, at least until this is over broadband to all can be thought of as, in part, component of a statewide education infrastructure.
nekbroadband 6y ago
Hi there, I'm a part of this effort and we did learn from the Burlington Telecom fiasco. Legislation was passed in 2014 that provided for the forming of Communications Union Districts which can build municipally controlled broadband infrastructure, but can't access the municipal bond market, meaning taxpayers are never at risk. The downside of this is we have to rely on federal funding in most cases since private capital wants to make sure they have the option to take it out on the taxpayer if the debt load becomes unserviceable. Right now this is not an issue at all for us with hundreds of millions of stimulus money specifically for broadband floating around, the challenge is beating Comcast et al to the money bin. Comcast in particular is pure evil in Vermont, they signed a contract to build out a paltry 550 miles of new cable to unserved addresses over 10 years (55 miles a year) and then sued the state afterwards for infringing on their 1st amendment rights. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/comcast-sues-vermont-to-avoid-building-550-miles-of-new-cable-lines/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/comcast-sues-ver... I'm with one of the largest CUDs in VT, NEK Community Broadband, which represents 27 towns in the northeast of the state. We're talking to our state government as we speak to make sure incumbent providers are held accountable if they are provided with federal money, and preferably, build our own infrastructure. The timeline for this has shrunk from 3-5 years, to 8 MONTHS by restrictions imposed on spending CARES act and other federal dollars by Jan 1. It's an exciting time!
- trevyn 6y ago
  Is there any provision for homeless residents?
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    Thankfully Vermont does not have as a significant homelessness issue like the Bay (can attest, born and raised in Vermont, currently in the Bay). It's less of an issue relative to getting widespread internet.
    - DFHippie 6y ago
      Parts of Vermont do have a sizable, if seasonal, homelessness problem. Brattleboro does, at any rate. Perhaps being in the Vermont banana belt does this.
6510 6y ago
Population: 623,989 23%: 143,517 300,000,000/143,517.47 = 2090 USD
- keeganjw 6y ago
  Wow dang, I hadn't done the math on that. That's much more cost effective than I though it'd be, what a deal!
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Growing up in Vermont wifi was so bad. Cell signal is still pretty awful in many parts of the state especially the northern kingdom. Hope this goes through. I have friends that are still on dial up.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
> That’s defined as speeds of 25 megabits per second for download and 3 megabits per second for upload. I really wish they just considered symmetrical speeds. These bizarre asymmetric speed limits are just a made-up limitation of the Comcast era.
- vtthrowaway2519 6y ago
  "Comcast era" is not accurate, nor is the limitation "made up". ADSL service in fact has been the best option for a lot of us in Vermont and other rural areas, and while DSL can be symmetric as a technology it gets hard in spread out deployments to keep up signal. There are real tradeoffs to make when total bandwidth (in the signal sense) is pretty limited, trying to get pushed over old copper. Going forward yes, it'd be nice to see symmetric speeds get emphasized more and hopefully made standard for any future targets. Widely deployed decent symmetric links would open up a lot of new options for decentralization, though it's probably worth being mindful of the negative effect it could have in terms of botnets if some thought isn't put into it. And a mere THREE down is definitely pretty absurd at this point, some friends on 25 Mbps ADSL still get 10 Mbps up and an office that is close enough to the provider to get 50 Mbps down is at ~24 up. But having some asymmetry at all doesn't seem inherently unfair yet? Between wisps/starlink/fiber maybe symmetric can be the goal next definition update.
- nekbroadband 6y ago
  We're currently fighting to get this definition changed to 100/100 symmetrical, because as you say this magic number of 25/3 lets DSL in the door, which in turn means incumbent providers can continue to get federal dollars that they will refuse to spend on infrastructure. Telcos will claim their ancient 50 year old copper is capable of delivering 25/3 to an area, when in fact only the first 5 houses on a road get near that number. If you happen to be the 12th house down the road (about a mile out) you get 7/1 on a good day because the copper was strung in the late 1950s. The minimum standard having a symmetric speed requirement prevents small diameter copper from stealing money from the pot.
  - treis 6y ago
prophesi 6y ago
To see a model of a municipal ISP succeeding, you can look at Chattanooga, TN's EPB.
Simulacra 6y ago
Municipal internet is something we should all get behind because the internet is no longer a luxury, or a tool, it's an essential service. Imagine not having the internet in the next pandemic.
- bhupy 6y ago
  I mean, I don't know that the essentialness of internet is a strong enough argument, there are so many things that are essential that we don't municipally provide — food, clothing, shelter, etc. The strongest argument for municipal internet is more that, like roads, it lends itself to natural monopolies.
- preinheimer 6y ago
  So in my mind, the municipality owning the fiber, and terminating it somewhere, then allowing whatever ISP wants to plug in to service customers seems ideal. This lets us get away from a single incumbent owning the last mile, while avoiding the municipality becoming a cable company/telecom/internet provider etc. What parts of the municipality being more involved appeal to you?
- celebrant 6y ago
  Food is also essential. Do we have municipal farms?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Kindof. We provide massive subsidies to farmers. Then the farmers give us food. But when we provide massive subsidies to ISPs, they don’t invest; They just spend it on executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
nojito 6y ago
State wide broadband is extremely hard to do. If you look at all the successful community broadband initiatives in the US, they are almost always at the city/county level.
_iyig 6y ago
Vermont has a troubled recent history with expensive, state-wide public initiatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Green_Mountain_Care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Gre... The elimination of rent-seeking behavior from healthcare and Internet service is great, in theory. For whatever combination of reasons, the state government of Vermont and city government of Burlington have had difficulty putting this theory into practice.
sys_64738 6y ago
I'd expect the Comcast lobbyists to go into overdrive to get this decision overturned. Also, I'd expect them to file a lawsuit against the state government of VT in a similar desired outcome. This would lead to the domino effect if it were allowed to occur.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I’m curious: on what grounds would Comcast have to sue? I could understand the US government stepping in with the Commerce Clause, but I don’t know of any laws that would give Comcast and friends the ability to sue.

288 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

I wish more states viewed it this way. I think that COVID19 has proven that Internet isn't a luxury, it's a utility that we all need. In a world with online meetings being the way to simply hang out with your friends, those with bad Internet connections are suffering more. It shouldn't be that way.

noxToken 6y ago
I have a coworker who basically doesn't participate in meetings. Their connection is so bad that maybe 10% of their sentences are intelligible.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Some video conferencing providers allow you to call in to a meeting with a landline telephone. I know Zoom does, anyway. No video, obviously, just voice.

votepaunchy 6y ago

Godspeed Vermont. May you have more success than your promised single-payer health care. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform

cure 6y ago

Yay for Vermont, but I hope they give their plan some teeth when the big telcos (who presumably would be doing the work) inevitably do not deliver on their promises. It would be much better if they turn it into the state-wide equivalent of municipal broadband. Maybe that's what they are thinking? The article is very light on details.

mobilefriendly 6y ago

These latest "broadband" efforts look like just another money grab by the same incumbents (Comcast, Frontier, etc) and the same state and federal bureaucracies that have failed to deliver competition and access. Vermont should simply announce full throated support for low-orbit satellite internet, which is under active deployment from SpaceX and also development from Amazon.

nekbroadband 6y ago
Absolutely agreed that the same inefficient companies are trying to grab the federal money once again. The difference this time is we have Communications Union Districts in place in many parts of the state that have veto power over proposed broadband projects in their region. As for LEOS internet, the elephant in the room for this technology is vulnerability to solar flares and Kessler syndrome. Long term viability of satellite super constellations is seriously in doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

siegbenn 6y ago

I live in Vermont and I'm tentatively excited about this. Unfortunately, our municipal internet provider in Burlington, VT was financially a disaster [1]. The tax payers put up a bunch of money. Burlington Telecom was mismanaged into defaulting on its debts causing the city's bond rating to fall to nearly junk bond status. It was sold at a loss to a private company. [2] Very disappointing considering how awesome Burlington Telecom is. I currently pay $35 for 1G symmetrical in my apartment building. Hopefully if this statewide project goes through, they don't repeat those mistakes. [1] https://vermontbiz.com/news/2019/march/13/citibank-fully-releases-burlington-335-million-bt-lawsuit https://vermontbiz.com/news/2019/march/13/citibank-fully-rel... (Citibank fully releases Burlington from $33.5 million BT lawsuit) [2] https://www.wcax.com/content/news/The-Burlington-Telecom-saga-and-how-we-got-to-where-we-are-455070453.html https://www.wcax.com/content/news/The-Burlington-Telecom-sag... (Burlington Telecom timeline: How did we get here?)

toomuchtodo 6y ago
The same could be said about Frontier [1] and Windstream [2]. I like that Vermont keeps trying, my internet should be like my water, sewer, and similar local services: a utility. The unemployed can be trained to run fiber, and the Fed is going to keep soaking up muni bonds [3], not much to lose by trying again. Capital is cheap, treat failure as just as cheap. It can be done [4] [5]. But you have to care. You have to build public systems and goods that are loved, because to love them is to want to provide ongoing care for them, and to invest yourself in them (financially and otherwise). [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-r... (EFF: Frontier’s Bankruptcy Reveals Why Big ISPs Choose to Deny Fiber to So Much of America) [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/windstream-isp-with-1-million-customers-files-for-bankruptcy/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/winds... (Windstream, ISP with 1 million customers, files for bankruptcy) [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/27/the-fed-says-it-is-expanding-its-municipal-bond-buying-program.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/27/the-fed-says-it-is-expanding... (CNBC: The Fed says it is expanding its municipal bond buying program) [4] https://muninetworks.org/communitymap https://muninetworks.org/communitymap (US Muni Fiber Map) [5] https://b4rn.org.uk/ https://b4rn.org.uk/ (England: Broadband for the Rural North)

knodi 6y ago

This is great for the people too bad Crapcast will kill this initiative.

eatonphil 6y ago

I've been looking into buying a house and moving to Vermont. The topic of fuller, better internet coverage seems to come up every few years. So I'm a little skeptical to see it now. I'm not sure I'd consider it a blocker to moving there, even if I'm dependent on the internet for work. I'm assuming I'll always be able to lease an office within an hour drive of the house. I wonder how practical satellite options like Viasat are says it gets 12-100Mbps download across Vermont. That's as good as Comcast's consumer broadband gets you in Philly. If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind.

mauvehaus 6y ago
Moved to VT in early January from the Boston area, in what was by sheer chance, a very timely move. We rent. We live in a bit of an odd development/area. Think of it as a golf course community minus the golf course: under a dozen homes, low density, and private roads. We quite like it, but it's an unusual arrangement from a utilities standpoint. We have Comcast. The other options were VTEL via satellite and cellular wireless. We struck cellular wireless from the list for reasons we're all well familiar with ("unlimited", caps, speed restrictions, cost). VTEL was going to be complicated because we have a metal roof, among other things. We're told that unofficially we can get line of sight to nearby VTEL infra, but convincing VTEL of this seemed like a lot of work while we were moving. We got ridiculously lucky on begin able to get Comcast. The pole our cable comes off of is literally the last pole with coax on it. In this regard, I suppose I'm replying to you from the actual end of the internet. There is possibly one other house within the radius of the pole that Comcast is wiling to pull a line. That's 300' for a temp line, which they did for us because the ground was frozen and the couldn't bury a line when they did the original install. I don't know if it's longer if they can do a direct bury. The latency and throughput aren't as good as they were in the Boston area, but it's good enough. Zoom calls tend towards blurry, but Netflix and Youtube are certainly serviceable. Instagram videos tend to pause a lot for buffering. Bad websites are apocalyptically bad. Joann.com, for example, is horrendously slow. I'm guessing they never worried too much about e-commerce until quite recently. I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in.

cryptoquick 6y ago

I live in Longmont, Colorado, and we have cheap municipal fiber. 1Gbps, synchronous, $55/mo. Just now: https://www.speedtest.net/result/9466487634.png https://www.speedtest.net/result/9466487634.png Similar speeds on Netflix's fast.com. This is what happens when monopolies have competition they can bully, but not buy.

bproven 6y ago
Hello neighbor! Fort Collins, CO checking in - municipal fiber, same service / speeds BUT we do have to pay $5 more per month. Oh well. :) Looks like quite a few other cities in CO are joining us soon..
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  Very cool! Apparently it costs a bit more now than when I first signed up. Also, they support 10G! I'm already wiring up everything with Cat8 and I'm looking for a 10G Router and a 10G Switch. It's been hard to find just the right one, though. Almost as hard as finding the perfect bento box. I'm looking for a 16-port or 24-port switch, ideally they'd all be 10G, but I could compromise a little on a few being multigig. Also, I'm not really worried about PoE, I don't have anything that could use that yet, and if I ever did, I'd purchase a separate switch, and probably not 10G. Price isn't a major concern, if I can't afford it, I'll just hold off with what I have until I can, and I've never really used a managed network interface, so I'd probably just prefer an unmanaged one. I do need to have a separate subnet for my wireless router set in AP mode, so whatever 10G router I choose, I'd want it to be able to support that. I've been looking into Mikrotik and Ubiquiti, and they don't seem to quite offer exactly what I'm looking for. Cisco might, but their site is... Incredibly difficult to use.
Keverw 6y ago
Surprised people with the tinfoil hats aren't worried about the city spying on people with municipal fiber. But kinda neat if the private companies are failing to meet the demand. I think Fiber would help attract startups and also more technical people who care about internet speeds. I wish my area had more incentives for tech and startups, but sounds like that probably won't happen anytime soon. Seen a news report some young guy created a iPhone app and couldn't get funding, so ended up leaving for San Francisco. Seems like some of these areas are doing a major disservice and persuading a entire generation to leave for their inaction by not keeping up with the times. Well I guess that is part of the brain drain problem. I wanted to start a computer club in middle school since the principle announced wanting to start more social clubs and activities, but of course that didn't go anywhere... Well considering funding a fire department and community recreation center is even hard here, I doubt faster internet is a priority. Kinda wonder how many people factor in internet speeds when moving.

kondu 6y ago

I'm always surprised by how bad and expensive the internet providers in the US are. Where I am (think major city in a 3rd world country), I pay about 20 USD a month for 650gb at 150mbps (up and down).

commandlinefan 6y ago

I wonder if this will be used as an excuse to start censoring the internet just as the FCC used "public airwaves" as an excuse to censor broadcast.

thrower123 6y ago

It's really interesting watching the natural experiments that are the northern New England states. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are small, essentially the same founding stock, and yet they go in such radically different directions.

jimhefferon 6y ago

My wife is a VT teacher, in secondary education. Obviously with Covid all students are being educated online. Those who do not have an online are at a quite significant disadvantage. That is, at least until this is over broadband to all can be thought of as, in part, component of a statewide education infrastructure.

nekbroadband 6y ago

Hi there, I'm a part of this effort and we did learn from the Burlington Telecom fiasco. Legislation was passed in 2014 that provided for the forming of Communications Union Districts which can build municipally controlled broadband infrastructure, but can't access the municipal bond market, meaning taxpayers are never at risk. The downside of this is we have to rely on federal funding in most cases since private capital wants to make sure they have the option to take it out on the taxpayer if the debt load becomes unserviceable. Right now this is not an issue at all for us with hundreds of millions of stimulus money specifically for broadband floating around, the challenge is beating Comcast et al to the money bin. Comcast in particular is pure evil in Vermont, they signed a contract to build out a paltry 550 miles of new cable to unserved addresses over 10 years (55 miles a year) and then sued the state afterwards for infringing on their 1st amendment rights. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/comcast-sues-vermont-to-avoid-building-550-miles-of-new-cable-lines/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/comcast-sues-ver... I'm with one of the largest CUDs in VT, NEK Community Broadband, which represents 27 towns in the northeast of the state. We're talking to our state government as we speak to make sure incumbent providers are held accountable if they are provided with federal money, and preferably, build our own infrastructure. The timeline for this has shrunk from 3-5 years, to 8 MONTHS by restrictions imposed on spending CARES act and other federal dollars by Jan 1. It's an exciting time!

trevyn 6y ago
Is there any provision for homeless residents?
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Thankfully Vermont does not have as a significant homelessness issue like the Bay (can attest, born and raised in Vermont, currently in the Bay). It's less of an issue relative to getting widespread internet.
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    Parts of Vermont do have a sizable, if seasonal, homelessness problem. Brattleboro does, at any rate. Perhaps being in the Vermont banana belt does this.

6510 6y ago

Population: 623,989 23%: 143,517 300,000,000/143,517.47 = 2090 USD

keeganjw 6y ago
Wow dang, I hadn't done the math on that. That's much more cost effective than I though it'd be, what a deal!

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Growing up in Vermont wifi was so bad. Cell signal is still pretty awful in many parts of the state especially the northern kingdom. Hope this goes through. I have friends that are still on dial up.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago

> That’s defined as speeds of 25 megabits per second for download and 3 megabits per second for upload. I really wish they just considered symmetrical speeds. These bizarre asymmetric speed limits are just a made-up limitation of the Comcast era.

vtthrowaway2519 6y ago
"Comcast era" is not accurate, nor is the limitation "made up". ADSL service in fact has been the best option for a lot of us in Vermont and other rural areas, and while DSL can be symmetric as a technology it gets hard in spread out deployments to keep up signal. There are real tradeoffs to make when total bandwidth (in the signal sense) is pretty limited, trying to get pushed over old copper. Going forward yes, it'd be nice to see symmetric speeds get emphasized more and hopefully made standard for any future targets. Widely deployed decent symmetric links would open up a lot of new options for decentralization, though it's probably worth being mindful of the negative effect it could have in terms of botnets if some thought isn't put into it. And a mere THREE down is definitely pretty absurd at this point, some friends on 25 Mbps ADSL still get 10 Mbps up and an office that is close enough to the provider to get 50 Mbps down is at ~24 up. But having some asymmetry at all doesn't seem inherently unfair yet? Between wisps/starlink/fiber maybe symmetric can be the goal next definition update.
nekbroadband 6y ago
We're currently fighting to get this definition changed to 100/100 symmetrical, because as you say this magic number of 25/3 lets DSL in the door, which in turn means incumbent providers can continue to get federal dollars that they will refuse to spend on infrastructure. Telcos will claim their ancient 50 year old copper is capable of delivering 25/3 to an area, when in fact only the first 5 houses on a road get near that number. If you happen to be the 12th house down the road (about a mile out) you get 7/1 on a good day because the copper was strung in the late 1950s. The minimum standard having a symmetric speed requirement prevents small diameter copper from stealing money from the pot.
- treis 6y ago

prophesi 6y ago

To see a model of a municipal ISP succeeding, you can look at Chattanooga, TN's EPB.

Simulacra 6y ago

Municipal internet is something we should all get behind because the internet is no longer a luxury, or a tool, it's an essential service. Imagine not having the internet in the next pandemic.

bhupy 6y ago
I mean, I don't know that the essentialness of internet is a strong enough argument, there are so many things that are essential that we don't municipally provide — food, clothing, shelter, etc. The strongest argument for municipal internet is more that, like roads, it lends itself to natural monopolies.
preinheimer 6y ago
So in my mind, the municipality owning the fiber, and terminating it somewhere, then allowing whatever ISP wants to plug in to service customers seems ideal. This lets us get away from a single incumbent owning the last mile, while avoiding the municipality becoming a cable company/telecom/internet provider etc. What parts of the municipality being more involved appeal to you?
celebrant 6y ago
Food is also essential. Do we have municipal farms?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Kindof. We provide massive subsidies to farmers. Then the farmers give us food. But when we provide massive subsidies to ISPs, they don’t invest; They just spend it on executive bonuses and stock buybacks.

nojito 6y ago

State wide broadband is extremely hard to do. If you look at all the successful community broadband initiatives in the US, they are almost always at the city/county level.

_iyig 6y ago

Vermont has a troubled recent history with expensive, state-wide public initiatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Green_Mountain_Care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Gre... The elimination of rent-seeking behavior from healthcare and Internet service is great, in theory. For whatever combination of reasons, the state government of Vermont and city government of Burlington have had difficulty putting this theory into practice.

sys_64738 6y ago

I'd expect the Comcast lobbyists to go into overdrive to get this decision overturned. Also, I'd expect them to file a lawsuit against the state government of VT in a similar desired outcome. This would lead to the domino effect if it were allowed to occur.

colejohnson66 6y ago
I’m curious: on what grounds would Comcast have to sue? I could understand the US government stepping in with the Commerce Clause, but I don’t know of any laws that would give Comcast and friends the ability to sue.