Broadband Committee Minutes 09.29.2023
Meeting date:
Friday, September 29, 2023
Present: Alfie Eisenberg, Sue Jonas, Bob Bitterli, Mary Murphy, Laura Abrahamsen
From CCI: Jeffrey McIver, Brian Lim (remote via zoom)
The only agenda item was a presentation from CCI on their proposal to apply for BMGI funds with Francestown.
Presentation was excellent and well received by attendees. They promised to send a copy of the slides.
They would like to apply for funds to build out the unserved and underserved areas of town. Since these areas are at the far ends of town for the most part, they will have to run fiber throughout most of their service area to get there. This will add many “passings” and they will offer service to residents along the way as well. In addition, they got approval from corporate to invest their own funds to build out areas already served by Comcast allowing them to offer it to every resident in town in their service area. Note, they do not plan on building in the northwest section of town covered by TDS, since TDS offers fiber in those areas.
Greenfield was built out recently so that makes things much easier as the infrastructure is already there.
Numbers for CCI Plan:
Grant Funded Portion:
- Total Cost: $1.3 million
- Total Passings: 513
- Cost Per Passing: $2,700
- CCI Contribution: $340,000
- CCI Contribution Per Passing: ~$700
- Grant Request: ~$1 million
CCI Capital Portion (Separate from our cost share for the grant):
- CCI will use its own capital to build a served area of town not covered by grant funding.
- Total Cost: $370,000
- Total Passings: 171
- Cost Per Passing: ~$2,200
- This will be fully funded with CCI’s own capital. No grant/bond funding or other town funding required.
I have requested the same information from Comcast and HUB66, which are the key numbers we need to know to make our final decision.
CCI will install anywhere there are already poles and/or buried conduit at no charge. They will also cover up to 500 feet if there are no poles.
A question was asked about the free account the library uses from Comcast and if CCI can do something similar. They have done things like this before and will find out how that works and investigate it.
Buildout for this grant if we get it will be 2025 since award will not come till end of year, and they plan 1 year from grant time for these things.
A nice-to-have would be to find all our unserved (including long driveways in served areas) addresses in the 911 database that are not in the FCC Fabric database. This will help providers with their cost per passing as there are more than a few missing, and they need to be in there for using the grant money for those addresses.
Timeline is short now. Applications are due October 20th, and there must be a copy of notes from a selectboard meeting supporting the selected provider submitted with the application. The only 2 options are October 9th and 16th for this to happen. I recommend we shoot for the former as providers may need time to finalize. In that case we need to make a recommendation to the selectboard this week.