West Virginia’s broadband future is up for hot debate in the state legislature as Internet haves and have nots fight over whether the state should spend money to bring broadband to those lacking it or improve service for those that do.

House Bill 2979, a bill to expand the broadband purview of the West Virginia Infrastructure and Jobs Development Council, has turned into one of the most contentious bills before the legislature this term. An amendment to redefine what speeds represent “broadband” and requiring the council to prioritize efforts on unserved areas has sparked the most debate.

Sen. Robert Plymale (D-Cabell) introduced and won support for an amendment that would discard the current provider-favored standard defining a community as “served” if customers can buy at least 200kbps service. Plymale favors adopting the federal broadband speed standard — 4/1Mbps as the bare minimum. Plymale also wants the state to devote most of its resources to getting broadband to rural areas that do not have the service today.

“If you’re going to compete in this world today, you have to have access,” Plymale told lawmakers. “Access has to be the number one item, and this amendment allows access to be the priority.”

Plymale

But other lawmakers representing constituents in communities that already have broadband, but receive inadequate speed and service, objected to Plymale’s amendment.

Sen. Herb Snyder (D-Jefferson) claims Plymale’s amendment would restrict the council’s ability to manage broadband resources and require it to spend most of its funding on wiring smaller communities at the cost of service upgrades that could reach more people. Approximately 85,000 West Virginians still have no broadband access other than satellite.

“It’s entirely appropriate to use taxpayer dollars to help and assist people to get broadband service and get on the information superhighway rather than upgrading those already on it,” argued Sen. Mitch Carmichael (R-Jackson), who also happens to also be an employee of Frontier Communications.

Much of the state’s broadband infrastructure spending has been devoted to institutional and middle mile networks that consumers and small businesses cannot directly access. Spending on “last mile” infrastructure makes the difference between getting broadband service or being told it is unavailable.

But Sen. Snyder argues satellite broadband already offers access to the entire state, so broadband speed improvements were more important.

“As we speak the entirety of West Virginia is bathed in 5Mbps satellite broadband service,” Snyder said. “So we’re already surpassing that standard in the entire state, unless you’re in a cave where you can’t get the signal.”

Getting the best broadband bang for the buck was a priority for Sen. Clark Barnes (R-Randolph). He wanted to make sure any amendment would not prevent the council from spending money in areas where satellite service was available.

“If we have 10 folks up in Possum Hollow that have no access to broadband, would they receive priority over the thousand people who only have 2Mbps service?” he said.

The answer would seem to be yes under Plymale’s amendment.

Burdette: Won’t release a publicly funded report to a reporter he considers “dangerous.”

A damning report criticizing West Virginia’s use of $126.3 million in federal stimulus tax dollars to expand broadband in the state may never be made public because it might “be embarrassing to some people.”

State taxpayers funded the $118,000 review but they cannot read the results because Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s administration has declared the report confidential.

Once again, the Charleston Gazette’s Eric Eyre was promptly on the case asking Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette why the state wants to keep the findings secret.

“The documents may be embarrassing to some people . . .  . Embarrassing because it was someone’s opinion,” Burdette told Eyre. “It was a specific document, citing specific companies, and making very specific suggestions to me.”

The newspaper did glean some information from its Freedom of Information request to the state — it learned of the existence of the consultant’s document and his criticism of some of the players involved in the broadband expansion effort.

But Burdette won’t name names, other than to say the consultant wasn’t targeting the governor’s office for criticism. Possible companies that could be in the report include various equipment vendors and consultants tied to technology companies including Verizon and Cisco. It could also target Frontier Communications, the largest grant recipient.

Burdette decided on his own he didn’t like the report’s findings and dismissed requests to release copies to the public because he claimed it was an “internal memorandum” not required to be released under state law.

“”There’s some criticism of the players in there that I don’t accept,” Burdette told the newspaper. “I had the memo drafted, but I didn’t use it. It was assumptions and making recommendations. At the end of the day, I didn’t agree with their assessment.”

That decision promptly sparked West Virginia’s House Minority Leader Tim Armstead (R-Kanawha) to demand the release of all documents related to the taxpayer-funded broadband stimulus program, noting the federal government administered program requires grant recipients to be open and transparent about how taxpayer funds are spent.

A secret report about that very subject does not meet that requirement, according to Armstead.

“When you have a project, and you’re talking about millions of dollars in spending, and there are questions about whether those funds were efficiently spent, the public has a right to know about it,” Armstead told the Gazette. “It’s insulting to tell the public they have to pay for something and they can’t see it. The public paid for that report.”

Armstead has introduced a bill that would drop the exemption from the Freedom of Information Act Burdette cited to keep the report secret.

When Eyre asked Burdette why he won’t release the report, Burdette responded, “Because you’re dangerous.”

Last week, Tomblin’s administration abruptly cancelled a statewide “broadband summit,” fearing ongoing scrutiny of the broadband funding project and how the money was spent would be the main topic of discussion.

Find the Frontier Fiber

After spending tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to wire more than 500 miles of fiber broadband cable in public buildings across West Virginia, Frontier is allegedly withholding detailed engineering maps detailing the new fiber network from its competitors.

The Charleston Gazette’s Eric Eyre has kept a close watch on broadband stimulus funding in West Virginia, and the circus of controversy surrounding how the money has been spent.

But now that Frontier’s taxpayer-funded institutional fiber network has been built, efforts to install Internet connections to end users has become complicated… unless you choose Frontier Communications as your vendor.

State Broadband Deployment Council member Jim Martin from Citynet has been a vocal critic of the broadband spending priorities in West Virginia for several years. He’s particularly irritated taxpayer funds have been effectively diverted to Frontier to build a modern fiber network that mostly benefits Frontier and its shareholders. Now his company wants to see if it can use the new fiber network to connect more West Virginians to fiber Internet service, but Martin claims he has been given the runaround by Frontier, state officials, and a broadband council that includes a Frontier executive as a member.

“A number of providers have inquired about where that fiber is located so they can expand broadband to customers,” Martin told the Gazette. “The engineering maps are important so they will know exactly where the fiber is connected, and so they can tap it.”

Only Martin cannot get the detailed engineering maps he needs. Eyre describes the high-tech equivalent of “button, button, who’s got the button?”

Martin started asking about the maps eight months ago. State officials overseeing the broadband expansion project promised to check into his request, but they haven’t released the engineering maps.

On Wednesday, Frontier executive Dana Waldo, who also serves on the Broadband Deployment Council, told Martin to request the maps from the state “broadband grant implementation team,” which heads the broadband expansion project.

“Those are requests that have to go to the implementation team,” said Waldo, who heads Frontier’s West Virginia operations. “It provides for a consistent process.”

However, Gale Given, who serves on the project team and heads the state’s Office of Technology, referred Martin to Frontier.

“If you need detailed engineering maps,” Given said, “it’s my understanding the [broadband project] team is not going to produce those.”

Given noted that less-detailed maps are available on the state’s broadband project website.

“If you need a specific area,” she said, “tell us the specific area you need.”

Martin says the maps on the website mentioned are hand-drawn Google Maps, unsuitable to work with because they lack detail.

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.

Critics of the broadband stimulus project question why the state spent money on unnecessary equipment and failed to identify anchor institutions that already had adequate service.

Another round of miscalculations by project managers overseeing a $126.3 million federal broadband stimulus grant nearing expiration will cost nearly half of West Virginia’s anchor institutions their promised fiber broadband connections.

As a consolation prize, state officials are promising those left out will receive new routers paid for by federal taxpayers whether the institutions want them or not.

As the deadline nears for West Virginia to finish spending their 2010 federal broadband grant, the state has been on a spending spree. Just last week, officials designated 175 new sites as “community anchor institutions” qualified for upgraded Internet service. But the Charleston Gazette found just seven of them will receive fiber broadband upgrades. The rest are getting expensive routers that the state has been trying to unload for nearly two years or new routers the state will spend additional grant funds to purchase.

Among the top vendors paid with grant funds: Frontier Communications, which provides connectivity, and Verizon Communications, the company that supplied the overpowered routers.

“Due to the amount of time required for environmental assessments and fiber builds, we determined that we would limit most of the additional sites to ‘router-only’ so that we could complete the build on time,” Diane Holley-Brown, a spokeswoman for the state Office of Technology told the newspaper.

The state defended its decision to scale back on fiber upgrades pointing out many of the institutions targeted already had the service. That left the state scurrying to find new projects for unspent grant funds.

The state’s latest award of Internet routers is separate from the earlier revelation West Virginia had over-purchased equipment that either proved unnecessary or duplicated equipment already installed.

Eric Eyre’s watchdog reporting in the Charleston Gazette over how the state’s $100+ million broadband grant has been spent has triggered a federal and state investigation.

In 2011, then Gov. Joe Manchin promised that federal broadband stimulus funding would provide fiber connectivity to 1,064 schools, libraries, public safety and health care institutions. When the project funding expires at the end of January, only 639 institutions will be slated to receive fiber upgrades.

Schools are among the hardest hit institutions. At least 60 percent of those promised upgraded Internet service will only receive a new router instead.

The project has remained under scrutiny since the Gazette revealed $24 million of the grant was spent on 1,064 Cisco routers that were never intended for use at many of the institutions targeted to receive them. Hundreds of the $20,000+ routers were stored, unused, in state buildings for at least two years waiting for a new home.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Inspector General and West Virginia Legislative Auditor are reviewing the router purchase.

When the grant expires West Virginia officials have made it clear those institutions left without fiber upgrades should not hold their breath waiting for the state to pick up where the federal government left off. The reason? The grant money is nearly gone and the state is not interested in financing additional upgrades.