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by vtthrowaway2519 2221 days ago
How do these munibroadband efforts dovetail with existing local fiber companies? I get access through Waitsfield & Champlain Valley Telecom and after granted a long delay on speeds they've been pretty aggressive about fiber rollouts in the last year or two. I'm down by Monkton and have 1G fiber. It's $105 a month, which is certainly more than BTV but this isn't a dense area at all either, and even when still on DSL they've always been really pleasant to deal with. I know there have been other fiber deployments in various places one might not expect at first glance in VT too, and the mountainous terrain is both an impediment to physical rollout but also offers some opportunities for WISPs.

Definitely excited to see more progress on this at last, and Comcast is certainly awful. I hope though that'll it'll benefit from and get boosted by what is here too.
1 comments
nekbroadband 2221 days ago
Very much so. We're looking at EC Fiber as a model of what a successful CUD looks like, and also talking to local electric distribution utilities who have unused fiber assets that we can license from them for residential use. Wireless we are very wary of here, as it is both weather and terrain dependent and provides poor speeds (usually around 14-20m) and one of the larger wireless internet providers, VTel, squandered a USDA rural broadband grant a few years ago and effectively locked the northeast region of the state out of further funding from that program.
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vtthrowaway2519 2221 days ago
Fair enough and thanks for the reply! I certainly didn't mean to suggests that WISPs should get any federal funding directly per se, more that one of the benefits of more fiber deployment would be more options for private higher speed "WISPs" (which could just be a techie on a hill who can put up a few cheap 400 Mbps class PtPs for some neighbors) so there might be coordination opportunities.

Per your comment elsewhere in the thread, I'd definitely like to see 100% of any NEW federal money in particular go to fiber. Even if it takes a while, every bit of incremental build out there is permanent progress, not wasted on dead end ancient copper.

Best of luck to you! I joined a vt governor's campaign back in 2010 in part because they were the only one to really focus on this issue. It's something I think could help the state significantly.

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