nekbroadband

I live one mile from town center in Danville and my only option is 7/1 DSL from Consolidated. I run a technology company out of the house and if I have to push up a build, it can take 8 hours or more. There is a coax line not 400 feet from my property and my 4 neighbors and I offered Charter $6000 toward their build costs as well as long term contracts and they told us to get lost. They simply do not care about rural America.

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

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.

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.

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-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!