Page 37 - BusinessWest October 3, 2022

new agreements to provide internet service to nearby towns Leverett and Shutesbury, and inquiries from, and preliminary talks with, other com- munities, said Fitzgerald, adding that SHELD’s board of directors must now decide just how entrepreneurial it wants to be with this product.
Indeed, the Fibersonic program, similar in many ways to a fiber ini- tiative launched by Westfield Gas & Electric — which Fitzgerald was part of — was initiated with the simple goal of providing better, more reli- able service to South Hadley residents and businesses. But its pattern of suc- cess, the new contracts with Leverett and Shutesbury, and the potential to add more small towns and even larger communities (there have been talks with Easthampton) have the potential to turn this into a dynamic new profit center for SHELD.
“Originally, the vision from the board was not to expand; it was to improve quality of life for residents of South Hadley — that was the initial plan. But in doing that, other towns became aware of us being an option; we did it very well, and we did it to what I would call the gold- standard level, so these expansion opportunities have fallen into our lap.”
“Originally, the vision from the board was not to expand; it was to improve quality of life for residents of South Hadley — that was the initial plan,” Fitzgerald said. “But in doing that, other towns became aware of us being an option; we did it very well, and we did it to what I would call the gold-standard level, so these expansion opportunities have fallen into our lap.”
SHELD has scheduled a strategic planning event for October, at which discussions will be had about where the utility can go from here with its fiber endeavor and whether further expansion should be pursued.
“That’s a discussion point that the board and I will have to have — how aggressive should we be as a municipal light plant in going after expansion of fiber?” he said, noting that, with scale, the utility can ultimately reduce the cost of the service it provides. “And these are questions we don’t have full answers to yet.”
For this issue and its focus on technology, BusinessWest talked with Fitzgerald about what is now officially known as Fiberspring (the recently detailed trucks with the brand can be seen on the roads), and what the next chapters in this intriguing story might be.
A New Gig
‘Big Gig.’ ‘Fiber Galaxy.’ ‘Gazoo.’
Yes, Gazoo, the extraterrestrial char- acter from the old Flintstones cartoon show.
These are just some of the dozens of names Fitzgerald and his team at SHELD considered as they went about
rebranding Fibersonic in conjunc-
tion with Darby O’Brien Advertising, the South Hadley-based firm that has developed a strong reputation for help- ing businesses and nonprofits with such endeavors.
As they talked about the process, Fitzgerald and O’Brien said potential new names would be tossed around, with their merits and shortcomings weighed, before most all of them would have to be discarded because they had been completely, or partially, trademarked by someone else. Such is the growth of this sector of the econ- omy, where the word ‘fiber’ has been attached to just about every conceiv-
able noun.
Oddly, and both O’Brien and
Fitzgerald thought it was odd, and that’s why they made very sure that Fiberspring was not trademarked. That’s the colorful brand name — liter- ally and figuratively — now, or soon to be, seen on trucks, business cards, let- terhead, and everything else.
By whatever name it goes, South Hadley’s new telecom business has become an intriguing success story, one that begins with SHELD’s hiring of Fitzgerald in 2017 with the intent of launching a business division to bring fiber to the home. As noted, Fitzgerald had been working for Westfield G&E
BusinessWest
TECHNOLOGY
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