We are hearing exciting news from western Massachusetts -- at least 17 towns have already held the necessary meetings and votes to join the Wired West cooperative that will build an open access, universal, FTTH broadband network in each of the member towns. This is an exciting project in a region largely left behind by cable and phone companies.

Back in January, we described the steps necessary to form a "Municipal Light Plant," in each community but a recent update from Wired West reminds us about the specifics:

Town participation in the WiredWest municipal telecommunications cooperative requires passing two consecutive town votes at separate meetings to establish Municipal Light Plant (MLP) legislation in the town. The MLP legislation was created in the Commonwealth over 100 years ago to enable towns to generate their own electricity. In 1996, the ability for towns to offer telecommunications services was added to the MLP statute. WiredWest charter towns researched various governance options and determined this was the best choice for enabling towns to offer telecommunications services, work together cooperatively and issue municipal debt to capitalize the network.

Towns have been passing the 2/3 votes with overwhelming approval, as in the town of Florida, with a 30-1 vote.

Wired West is maintaining an impressive map of the status of each town along the path. Clicking on a town brings up more information about that town. Kudos to them for making a great map that is easy to use and conveys a lot of information.

The Berkshire Eagle recently published an op-ed discussing the importance of economic development in the area:

Because many Berkshirites work, either at home or in an office, in towns without high-speed Internet service, making such connections widely available is vital to economic development in the county. I’m a volunteer with WiredWest, a cooperative effort of 47 towns in Western Massachusetts to build a locally-owned fiber-optic network to provide broadband services to homes and businesses. With this network the Berkshires can compete with anywhere else in the country, or the world for that matter, as a place to live and work. Without it, unwired areas of the county will become economic deadzones.

Monica Webb, spokeswoman for Wired West, was interviewed about the network:

"We've got 47 towns that have opted to join the organization and have been part of the discussions," she said. "Of those, about 30 are actively pursuing the government structure required to join Wired West, which requires two votes at two town meetings. In July, we will have the meeting to form our cooperative and we're hoping that at least a couple of dozen towns will join after that. We already have our recommended articles of incorporation and bylaws so that once this is formed it can be acted on quickly."

…

"I do have satellite and although I hear a lot from people that the weather affects their connection, that's less of an issue for me than the integrity of the system itself," she said in a phone interview. "If it goes out, they have to send a technician out to fix it and that can take up to a week. I've had to sit on the steps of the library twice a day to send and receive emails and I know I'm not the only one who's doing this. Even with the satellite, I've had to send three separate emails to people because a file was too big. This is really no way to conduct a business."

And she has developed an incredible metaphor for explaining why wireless alone is not sufficient for the economic development and high quality of life local residents need:

"I try to tell people, imagine that you are at the top of a hill with two pails of water and you want the water to go to the bottom of the hill. Dump one directly on the ground and then pour another down a pipe that is running downhill. That's the difference between fiber and wireless. And besides, fiber sets the foundation for wireless. Wireless will never have the capacity to run a business."

This is exactly correct. Wireless is no substitute for the reliability and high capacity of a fiber-optic connection. Unfortunately, rural residents across the country have to deal with the same issue -- policymakers who want to take the path of least resistance by leaving rural residents barely connected to the the engine of economic development and quality of life: modern communications.

We previously noted the long video released by Wired West but below we have embedded a shorter, Director's Cut.

The Roanoke Times recently published an extensive story about broadband, covering everything from what it is to why it is needed and who doesn't have it.

Aside from providing an excellent primer on these issues to those who are new to broadband discussions, Jeff Sturgeon writes about problems often ignored by the media, like the difficulties for companies and other entities can encounter when they need extremely high capacity connections:

Skip Garner directs the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, which unites the powers of biology and information technology to advance medicine. It is at Virginia Tech. Garner said he, too, finds computing power a constraint. In spite of a 1 gigabit connection, "we are limited in what we could do," Garner said.

When the lab's DNA sequencers pile up data, "we will often put it on a 1-terabyte drive ... and FedEx it to our customers," Garner said.

An upgrade to 10 gigabits is coming. He expects it still won't be enough.

It might appear that new facilities would not have such problems, but even the 5-month-old Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute near downtown Roanoke is not satisfied with its Web service. While the speed is good at 10 gigabits, the cost it pays to service providers is staggering.

"It's in the tens of thousands of dollars a month," said Executive Director Michael Friedlander.

This is one world. Communities with their own fiber networks are another -- where these connections are not prohibitively expensive. And yet another world is the world of several rural Minnesota Counties, who cannot even get T.1 lines from incumbent phone providers. In Cook County, in 2008, a company was quoted $600,000 to install a T.1 line. Yes, $600,000 - I had to hear it twice to make sure I wasn't imagining it.

The article explores Design Nine founder Andrew Cohill's thoughts on improving broadband access. Cohill mentions Wired West, a network we have written about previously.

"We think it's got to be treated like essential public infrastructure," he said.

That way, access would be open to any service provider on equal footing. Just as anyone could launch a cab company or food delivery service over the road system, anyone will be able to use the information highway's new lanes. This creates competition, and competition lowers prices.

Cohill has seen it happen elsewhere. One of about 100 U.S. regions getting aggressive in this area is western Massachusetts, where 47 localities combined efforts to install fiber-optic Internet cabling to homes covering about one-quarter of the state, he said.

"Their vision is fiber everywhere. Fiber to every home, every business," Cohill said.

In western Massachusetts, Cohill ran into Douglas Trumbull, the 68-year-old film director behind the special effects in such films as "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Silent Running" and "Brainstorm."

At his home in the area, Trumbull wants a 300 mbps connection to support his continued work in the special effects business; his phone company-provided Web access is too slow. Trumbull said that if high-speed connectivity were available through the region where he lives, "he'd bring 100 more, very high paying movie jobs, technical jobs to western Massachusetts. Why western Massachusetts? He thinks it's a beautiful place to live. It's the same mountain chain as down here. So there's tremendous opportunities, but it's not about attracting another manufacturer," Cohill said.

And finally, the article returns to a network in their own backyard -- the Wired Road, a publicly owned open access network.

Fiber optic-based Web service from three providers is available at 60 buildings in downtown Galax over lines installed by a three-government authority. The Galax-based Wired Road Broadband Authority expects to finish this year with $3 million raised and spent out of a $42 million plan to connect every home, business and community institution in Galax and the counties of Carroll and Grayson, a region of about 54,000 people, that will want Internet services that require fiber.

Private telecommunications providers could not be counted on to do the work, because the payback would have been too low, said Mike Maynard, a Grayson County supervisor who chairs the Wired Road board.

"The only reason we're in this is to get people connected," Maynard said. "If we had to wait for private entities to invest $42 million in the region, I don't know that it would ever happen."

Exactly. Many communities are realizing they need to invest in themselves before anyone else will invest in them. Unfortunately, Virginia is one of many states that have created unique barriers to discourage community networks. We should be long past coddling monopolies with laws to restrict communities from building the networks they need. But in Virginia, we aren't.

Western Massachusetts' Wired West is an exciting approach to bringing next-generation broadband networks to rural areas. Thanks to Design Nine's news blog for alerting me to this decision.

For those unfamiliar with our coverage of Wired West, a two page write-up in Berkshire Trade & Commerce Monthly [pdf] offers a good background:

“You often hear that it is too expensive to bring fiber-optic lines to every home, business and institution in a rural area," said Webb, who lives in the remote southern Berkshire town of Monterey. “But that only means it’s too expensive for the business model of private-sector companies who have to show profitability in a very short period. It is not too too expensive if it is done by the communities themselves on a basis that does not have to meet those market demands."

Wired West has announced a decision on the difficult issue of governance structure. They are going to be a public co-operative, comprised of the member towns.

Now the member towns will have to approve the structure and the organization will move forward on the planning necessary to develop, finance, and build their broadband network.

While researching the Wired West Network in rural Massachusetts, I learned about another community broadband network. The little town of Warwick built a wireless network for itself; the story behind it gives a glimpse into the ways that the federal approach to broadband really fails small communities.

Miryam Ehrlick Williamson described their motivations and experiences. In 2008, after considering their options, they voted to borrow $40,000 in a town meeting (Warrick has 750 people) to build a simple wireless system that would be far superior to the existing options of dial-up and satellite (neither of which are a service that could properly be termed broadband). State and federal programs ostensibly meant to help towns in this position do little good:

We know about a USDA program meant to bring broadband to rural America. Our information is that most of the money has gone to suburban communities in Texas, and we don’t have a professional grant administrator to chase down any money that might be left.

We’re aware that the Massachusetts governor just signed a $40 million act establishing the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, to figure out how to bring broadband to unserved and underserved towns. We’re also aware that the money will go to vendors to develop regional systems and we don’t have the patience to wait the two or three years it will take for anyone to get around to thinking about maybe serving us.

Ultimately, the City was able to lend itself the money:

As it has turned out, we didn’t need to borrow — town financial officers found the funds without going to the bank for them. We got the necessary permits from the owners of two towers here, bought the equipment, got a couple of people trained to install the equipment, and turned on our first customers in March, 2009.

Between a local mountain and available cell tower, the topology apparently fits a fixed-wireless approach (at least for a significant part of the population). Nonetheless, they were well aware that the system would not have the reliability of robust wired networks - but occasional interference was vastly preferable to the status quo.

The plan expected to break even with as few as 15 households, but they have since achieved far more than that -- some 70 households as of February 2010. Aside from an upfront receiver cost of $400-$500 (which can be shared among close neighbors), the costs are $50/month. They are running backhaul on two T-1 lines, for which they pay $600/month -- a reminder of just how much people in rural areas have to overpay for basic connectivity.

They expect to break even in 2012. However, they may push that back depending on expansions decisions:

There are still families in town eager to subscribe, but we’re running out of places our wireless signal can reach. Expanding the system is possible, but there’s a lot to figure out.
If we spend subscriber fees to buy the needed equipment, that delays the day when we’ve paid off our debt to the town, and we’re aware that not all taxpayers benefit equally from having lent us the $40,000.

Not to harp on the whole failure of state and federal policy thing, but:

We may be able to obtain a state grant to buy what we need, but that means a ton of paperwork and all three members of the broadband committee (of which I’m one) are self-employed, and if we don’t work we don’t earn.

That leaves the proposal writing to the town’s part-time administrative coordinator, and he’s as busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the hives. We’ll figure it out, but there’s another consideration.

Too often, federal and state attempts to help just complicate the matter. The first thing a state should do to expand community broadband is to remove barriers to it, not set up complicated grants and such that are too complicated to help the smaller towns with even smaller staffs.

Finally, the blog post that alerted me to all this also updated me on the Wired West Initiative:

Three of the 49 towns decided they had sufficient broadband Internet coverage not to bother. So far, 39 of the remaining 46 towns have voted to join WiredWest, all but one by unanimous vote. Six towns will have their ATMs [Annual Town Meetings] during the rest of the month, and in one the select board will vote (almost certainly favorably.)

Photo of Warwick City Hall used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of John Phelan