Marshall

Karen Marshall, Vermont’s appointed “broadband czar” and head of ConnectVT has accepted a lucrative job offer from one of the broadband providers she formerly oversaw.

Marshall’s trip through the revolving door from public servant to the private sector she helped regulate will land her as the new president of VTel Data Network.

Raising eyebrows across the state is the fact her new employer received $116 million in broadband stimulus grants in 2011 to expand service in rural Vermont. Less than two weeks ago, Marshall was praising VTel for another $5 million state grant from the state’s telecommunications authority to expand rural cell service in the state. VTel is the largest recipient of taxpayer-financed grant funding in Vermont.

VTel executives said Marshall would be a perfect fit for the company that owns a fiber network in the state with connections to New York, Montreal, and Boston.

VTDigger called Marshall, a former Comcast employee, a one-woman enforcer for the current administration’s broadband goals:

Her job has been to ensure that state and federal agencies, private companies and Vermont municipalities work together to meet the governor’s 2013 deadline.

The VTel project is key to that effort. No other company has received as much federal funding. ECFiber, a fiber-optic company, Burlington Telecomm and FairPoint are also expanding broadband in the state.

ConnectVT is widely viewed as Shumlin’s alternative to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, which is dominated by former Gov. Jim Douglas appointees. After four years of state funding, the authority failed to make much progress on broadband expansion, in part because of corporate disinterest in investing in expensive rural broadband development. It’s only been in the last few years that private companies were awarded enough federal funding to make extending broadband access to very rural parts of the state financially viable.

The nation’s largest broadband stimulus grant recipient has turned a $126.3 million taxpayer funded broadband expansion program into an “orchestrated train wreck,” charged West Virginia Delegate Nancy Guthrie (D-Kanawha) on Monday.

West Virginia Homeland Security Director Jimmy Gianato defended his management of the project before a joint state House-Senate technology committee just learning it had been scaled back, dropping more than 400 sites that were slated to have fiber broadband upgrades Gianato claimed they already had.

Gianato defended the project, noting the original grant proposal was held up by the Commerce Secretary as one of the best-written proposals in the country.

Lawmakers did not criticize how the proposal was written. Instead, they questioned how the project was administered and how the money was spent.

“We’ve done everything the grant said we would do,” Gianato countered.

Many of the questions surrounded the decision to purchase 1,064 Cisco routers in 2010, which cost taxpayers $22,600 each, and were rejected by more than a few intended recipients. Several hundred routers ended up in storage, unused.

Still murky is why project managers only considered a single, expensive Cisco-brand router recommended by Verizon-employed consultants and ultimately purchased directly from Verizon.

Guthrie

Gianato claimed the federal government tied his hands requiring West Virginia’s broadband project be “shovel-ready.”

“All of the equipment was bought off contracts that had been competitively bid,” he told the conference.

But project managers and consultants can custom-tailor specifications that make it impossible for vendors to specify anything other than the Cisco router Verizon conveniently happened to sell.

Several members appeared unmoved by statements defending the decision to deploy identical, expensive routers to every West Virginia anchor institution, despite the fact they were designed to serve a minimum of 500 concurrent users and often ended up in rural community libraries with less than five public terminals.

Gale Given, the state’s chief technology officer, supported Gianato.

“The team determined that capacity should be provided to permit these community anchor institutions to deploy the applications that were required to meet future needs, not their current needs,” Given wrote in a letter to state lawmakers. “It would be a mistake to determine in advance that entities with low bandwidth requirements today will not have high bandwidth requirements in the future. To have shortchanged our smaller, more rural areas would have gone against the entire intent of the program.”

But now West Virginia taxpayers will be on the hook to cover the costs of making the new equipment compatible with existing equipment in certain state facilities.

At least 70 State Police detachments will begin using the once-rejected routers once the state spends $90,000 for new modules to update the agency’s voicemail system, which is not compatible with the routers.

State libraries also won a break from Frontier Communications, who agreed to supply fiber broadband service to 170 mostly small, rural libraries that could not afford the fiber upgrade. Frontier has agreed to supply the fiber service for the same price libraries pay for their existing service.

Time Warner Cable is expanding its footprint in the capital region of New York with the acquisition of independent Princetown Cable Company, which serves around 600 subscribers in Princetown, Duanesburg and Rotterdam in Schenectady County.

Time Warner already manages cable service for most cable subscribers around the Albany-Schenectady region, but bought Princetown Cable to further solidify its holdings.

Princetown Cable began service in 1990 serving rural areas ignored by then-dominant TCI Cable (later AT&T Cable, then Comcast).

Most customers signed up to get better reception of television signals from nearby Albany and Utica.

Princetown Cable’s lineup of around 100 channels ($82.50/month for digital cable) is dwarfed by Time Warner, and its broadband service is comparatively slow and expensive:

Time Warner Cable agreed to pay $1.2 million for the system, which breaks down to around $2,000 per subscriber.

At least 95 percent of Vermont residents will have access to broadband by the end of today, because of a combination of private investment, public funding, and innovative service solutions for some of the state’s most rural areas.

State officials say 2012 was an important year for broadband availability in Vermont, as dominant phone company FairPoint Communications made inroads in expanding its DSL service in areas that never had access before.

In 2011, Governor Shumlin set an ambitious goal to see 100 percent of Vermont covered by broadband by the end of 2013, and the state appears on track to achieve that target in the coming year.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Ask The Governor Broadband 2-3-11.flv[/flv]

Gov. Shumlin answered questions from state residents regarding his plan to see 100% broadband coverage in Vermont by the end of 2013. (Feb. 3 2011) (3 minutes)

Vermont’s small size would seem to make it an easy target for total broadband coverage, but significant rural areas have made it unprofitable for commercial phone and cable companies to make inroads.

Comcast, the state’s largest cable operator, has not grown much geographically over the past five years. FairPoint, which took control of much of the state’s landline network from Verizon in 2008, has been compelled to achieve broadband expansion as part of an agreement that approved the sale.

Karen Marshall, who heads a state effort to expand both cell phone and broadband access in Vermont says the remaining areas without coverage will be a difficult challenge, but one that can be achieved with the help of private and public investment.

“The last 5 percent are the needle in the haystack,” Marshall told Vermont Public Radio. “They are the most far-flung, probably the most expensive and sometimes even the most physically challenging to get to.”

Wireless is often the most cost-effective solution, both for broadband and cell expansion, and Marshall suggested Vermont would use microcell technology along Vermont’s rural roadways.

“I think we will be one of the first places in the country that is deploying microcell technology for example, on the top of telephone poles or utility poles, kind of like a daisy chain,” Marshall said.

The rural Vermont Telephone Company won a $5 million state grant to cover Vermont’s southernmost counties with a combination of wireless phone and broadband service.

While areas of rural Vermont will likely have broadband access for the first time, improvements have also been available to those who already have the service.

Marshall estimated the average broadband speed in the state has increased from 5.5 to 9.7Mbps, which is above the national average.

Vermont Public Radio surveys how the state is doing meeting Gov. Shumlin’s goal to see broadband service available to every Vermonter. (December 28, 2012) (2 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

This FCC broadband coverage map depicts broadband service gaps in orange.

According to broadband coverage maps drawn from data provided by telecommunications companies across Mississippi, high speed Internet service is available just about everywhere in the state.

Only it isn’t.

Now one Public Service Commissioner is going public warning broadband expansion funding is in jeopardy because the Federal Communications Commission is relying on faulty map data.

Northern District Commissioner Brandon Presley told the DeSoto Times-Tribune things are not nearly as rosy as some providers would have you believe.

“The maps the FCC have are just plain wrong,” Presley said. “Their maps show that Mississippi is almost completely covered and that is certainly not the case. Getting this corrected is a top priority so that Mississippi can get its fair share of funding to cover these areas for residents and businesses.”

The implications for DeSoto County, Mississippi’s fastest growing county, are profound.

Thanks to map data volunteered by service providers that suggest virtually the entire state already has access to broadband, federal assistance funding for expanding Internet access may be off-limits. Most assistance programs require that areas be unserved to avoid duplicating existing service.

“Currently, the map vastly overstates the broadband coverage in the state,” Presley said. “While the map shows neighboring states with extensive underserved areas, Mississippi appears with nearly universal coverage.”

The FCC’s map of unserved areas depicts Mississippi as a broadband outlier in the southern United States, with far more service options than other nearby southern states. Digging deeper reveals major problems with the FCC’s data.

For instance, the state’s map reveals much of Mississippi is covered by wireless providers like AT&T, C-Spire, and Verizon. But those companies offer only limited data plans at high prices that are not equivalent to traditional wired broadband from a cable or phone company. A company called Callis Communications is depicted as providing a large part of the state with DOCSIS 3 cable modem service, when in fact Callis markets cloud-services to business customers and does not operate a cable company.

Most of Mississippi’s broadband connections from cable companies and AT&T are in larger communities including Tupelo, Jackson, Meridian, Gulfport, Hattiesburg and Biloxi. That leaves large sections of central and western Mississippi with significant service gaps.

Presley said his office is working to correct the FCC’s National Broadband Map, but with federal spending cutbacks looming, it may already be too late.

“Without this assistance, rural communities will continue to be left behind as small businesses, health care and emergency services will be left without necessary access to the Internet,” Presley told the newspaper.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WLOX Biloxi Broadband map could cost the state millions 12-21-12.mp4[/flv]

WLOX in Biloxi reports Mississippi officials are scrambling to correct faulty broadband map data with the FCC so the state can qualify for broadband expansion funding.  (2 minutes)