Taking High-speed Broadband to Every Corner of the Commonwealth

It’s called MassBroadband 123, the project to bring high-speed broadband to every corner of the Commonwealth, including historically underserved Western Mass. The scale of the initiative is immense, and the challenges are numerous, but there will be clear and immediate rewards from bringing the entire state into the 21st century.

The one-year anniversary is coming up for the day the Mass. Broadband Institute (MBI) received significant funding from federal stimulus efforts, effectively beginning the digitalization of the Commonwealth’s Internet. The project is known as MassBroadband 123, and, according to Judy Dumont, a lot has happened since then.
Director of the MBI, Dumont told BusinessWest recently that the project has not been without hurdles, but with some key players in place, both in her office and with partnerships in the private sector, the days of dial-up are soon to be relegated to a bygone era.
The MBI was put into place by Gov. Deval Patrick and the State Legislature back in 2008 to “close the digital divide,” as the catchphrase has become known — in other words, to bring broadband Internet to every community in the Commonwealth. No small feat.
When Patrick signed the Broadband Bill in August 2008 at a public ceremony in Goshen, it created the MBI, and the office was initially capitalized with $40 million in state bond funds. “At the time, the notion was to use those funds to catalyze private-sector investment,” Dumont explained. “I don’t think it was exactly the next day, but pretty soon after, the capital markets collapsed.
“And that has created an interesting turn of events for this project,” she added.
While the MBI has faced this and a series of ongoing and unfolding hurdles to bring high-speed Internet to every pocket of Western Mass. — the region of the Commonwealth that has historically been most underserved by broadband — not only has Dumont’s office been able to turn these drawbacks into strategic progress, but the goal has an actual, set time to fully go online.
July 2013 — that’s the deadline that Washington has set for the MBI to fully hardwire Western Mass. “That is, by most accounts, a blazingly fast pace to get all this done,” Dumont said. “And if that’s not enough already, the governor wants this to be done before then. He understands how difficult it is for the citizens and businesses of Western Mass. who have been grappling with the lack of broadband for over a decade.”
In a conversation with BusinessWest, Dumont outlined the MBI’s trajectory on its first birthday. And while much of Western Mass. has been offline from access to high-speed Internet, that digital divide is gradually closing. The work has been started — you’ve seen it in the trenching projects on I-91, and trucks will be out this summer evaluating the numerous utility poles to bring fiber-optic cables to even the most remote hilltowns. As the MBI proudly states in its mission — and this is one instance where words aren’t just a political rhetorical exercise — the Commonwealth is about to become fully connected.

Line Items
Dumont had 20 years of experience in management, and more than 17 in wireless telecommunications, when Patrick appointed her the director of the MBI in December 2009. Delving into her office’s back story, though, she explained how the bad bond market actually put the MBI back on line.
“That put $7.2 billion into the stimulus for broadband,” she said. “The majority of that money was given to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and they had two rounds of funding.” It was a bit of a fingers-crossed moment when the MBI didn’t get first-round funds, but in July 2010, $45.4 million was allocated to the Commonwealth in the second round.
However, Dumont said that a few projects had already been in the works.
“We had moved forward already, independent of federal decisions,” she said. “We worked with the Mass Dept. of Transportation — MassHighway at the time — to piggyback off a project that they had underway on 91. They were building an intelligent traffic system up the I-91 corridor, and we said it makes sense, given that you’re digging up the highway, to put spare conduit in the ground so that we can run fiber optics. The project was cited in the National Broadband Plan that the FCC came out with last year as a model of ‘dig once.’”
That model of efficiency is something she said the MBI is encouraging in future infrastructure projects. “When we’re opening the roads, even if you don’t think there’s a need for it today, we need to make sure that you’re putting that spare conduit in. You don’t even need to have the fiber-optic cables in there now; just make it easy for the future.”
The successful implementation of broadband already has enough hurdles, not the least of which was that six-month lag between stimulus funding rounds. “Look at it this way,” she said. “We’re building a 1,300-mile network throughout Western and Central Mass. The hurdles are almost as many as there are miles.
“First off we had to get approval from the federal government on a finding of no significant impact to the environment” or FONSI, she explained. “That is an unusual thing to do on a project of this magnitude, to get that approval across that wide of terrain. Normally, you would get the approvals in segments — smaller pockets here and there, just to get going while you work on the subsequent projects. But of course, the federal government didn’t want to give any of their money until they knew that the entire project would pass the FONSI test.”
The second hurdle, one that will be an issue for this summer, is the aerial buildout for the broadband fiber-optic cables in this region. “Unlike 91, where we utilized trenched, underground lines, we are going to attach our cables to utility poles,” she continued. “We need to attach our cables to more than  35,000 utility poles, and those are owned by Verizon, National Grid, Western Mass. Electric, and eight other municipal electric companies. We need agreements with all of them, cooperation with all of them, and there’s a process by which each one of those utility poles has to be looked at by every one of the owners.
“It’s a very old-fashioned process,” she continued, “but we got the utilities to agree to a more automated process. We’ve gotten a consultant to go out and collect all the data — GPS coordinates, digital imagery — everything to go into a database to be used in reconciliation. All of that needs to happen before I can even begin putting my cables on those poles.”

Mind the Gap
Dumont likened the MassBroadband 123 project to the rural electrification of America at the turn of the last century. And like that monumental undertaking, the key to success came from a unique partnership with the private sector.
“When we looked at the ROI on this project here in the Commonwealth,” she explained, “we figured that it was going to be a 30-year timeline. There isn’t a business in the world that would allow that. Thus, it takes that partnership between public and private.”
And while she credits the MBI staff as possessing some of the brightest talent in the industry — including a manager who built the Five College network — she said that it was important to get a private collaboration with a service provider, one that could navigate the complexities of broadband implementation as well.
Axia Next Generation Networks, based in Canada, has successfully developed similar IT networks in France, Spain, Singapore, and, most notably, the Canadian province of Alberta. Its Calgary SuperNet is the world’s largest rural broadband network, and Dumont said she’s quite impressed with the company’s track record.
Since the MBI isn’t going to be a network service provider, Dumont said that it is Axia that will be subcontracting all the actual connections to local Internet service providers. Axia will be opening an office in Western Mass. and, within the next 10 years, plans to invest $35 million to $45 million in the Commonwealth. It will wholesale broadband to the local companies from which residents and businesses will buy service.
MassBroadband 123 is a far more ambitious project than any of Axia’s others, she said, with connections to almost 1,400 community anchor institutions — hospitals, libraries, schools, town halls, facilities that will provide public access — more per square mile than any other similar project in the nation.
But the SuperNet is an good point of reference, a comparison Dumont called “looking into a crystal ball for Massachusetts.” The installation of that network created a boom for local Internet providers.
“Five years ago, before the SuperNet,” Dumont said, “there were somewhere in the neighborhood of five service providers delivering broadband, most of them in downtown Calgary. There are now more than 80 service providers in the entire province.
“Since we’re a much smaller network — theirs is a 10,000-mile network — I don’t think we’ll see that many,” she added. “In a competitive environment, though, it’s not just going to be that people finally have access to broadband, but the advent of new companies will allow for better price offerings. Not only is there now finally an option, but then we can work on a competitive market after it actually exists for everyone.”

The Last Mile
The combination of federal funds and a state budget of $24.1 million has allowed the MBI to build out the backbone of MassBroadband 123, what Dumont called “the costliest element.” The last mile is the private rollout of the network, and Axia has engaged a business-development consultant to help municipalities and those anchor institutions to deliver broadband throughout the Commonwealth.
Significant strides have been taking place to adhere to that aggressive timeline, in both Washington and on Beacon Hill, and recently, the city of Springfield agreed to partner with the MBI for a series of historic underground conduits for the fiber-optic cables — yet another hurdle cleared.
In addressing the importance of broadband, Dumont said her office is engaged not only in the task of building the network, but in educating the public on the importance of this digital bridge. Regarding its role as an agent of economic development, she referred again to that “crystal ball” that can be looked into from Axia’s SuperNet project.
“Sure, it is about economic development, but it’s also about keeping pace with so many other things,” she explained. “The Internet is how people find jobs, how they file their taxes, how they interact with their government. They find out about the political process and become educated there. We received more than 400 letters of support we sent down to Washington when we filed for the stimulus money, and they contained the stories of what people needed to do for access to the Internet. The hoops that people in Western Mass. have to jump through to have access to what I’m using sitting here at my desk … that’s simply a social injustice.
“There are more home businesses in Western Mass. than in any other part of the state, and think about how those could grow and advance when they have access,” she continued. “For small design firms where pictures need to be sent to clients, they sometimes have to send it after hours, leaving their computers running all night hoping that the transmission didn’t time out before the files were delivered.”
And it’s not just dollars, but also sense, Dumont said. “In Western Mass., there are 27 police stations that don’t have online access to the criminal-justice system. They have to telephone in any requests for information.”
The Internet also plays vital roles in health care. Areas of remote Alberta have Telestroke centers, where patients can go, get a CT scan, get a remote diagnosis from doctors more than 10 hours away, and, if necessary, be given a drug that needs to be administered within two hours to significantly reduce the damage caused by the stroke. “When you look at that network across all access of our lives,” said Dumont, “you can really see the difference that it has made.”
Later this summer, she said, the trucks will begin stringing up the fiber-optic cables to bring the 21st century to every corner of the Commonwealth. And during that time, Axia will also be working with the anchor institutions to talk about what applications will be available to them once they get this network.
“We want to make sure that everyone knows the full potential ahead,” she said.
But, with deadlines looming, she laughed that, at this stage of MassBroadband 123, there still is a lot of work to do, and most likely hurdles she doesn’t know about yet. “In a project of this magnitude, things will crop up every day.
“People sometimes say that the last stretch of construction projects is either a marathon or a sprint, but this is both,” she said. But with all the right builders of that digital bridge here in Western Mass, the divide looks to be closing fast. You might even say with high speed.