|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
It must be corruption because nobody is actually this stupid.
by Rob Roper
Two and a half years ago I wrote a piece titled “Auditors Report: Just How Bad Lawmakers Screwed Up the Broadband Buildout.” This followed a post nearly two years before that when Covid was raging, schools were closed, and kids in rural communities were doing their on-line homework from their cars in McDonald’s parking lots, stealing Ronald’s WiFi. But the lawmakers in Montpelier made the incredibly selfish and shortsighted decision to reject Starlink, the low earth orbit satellite system, as an option for providing high-speed internet service to rural, underserved communities desperately in need.
At the time, Rep. Laura Sibilia (I-Dover) of the Energy & Technology Committee, said “I have less than zero interest in facilitating or seeing the state facilitate [a contract with Starlink] (Bennington Banner, 4/5/21).” And so, they didn’t! Instead, she and a merry band of geniuses under the Golden Dome enacted a bureaucratic, money-sucking quagmire consisting of ten Communications Union Districts (CUDs) overseen by a Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB), which, coincidentally, LOL, Sibilia has been on since its inception.
All this background is by way of saying, rural Vermonters have been promised statewide fiberoptic-based high speed internet for years by politicians who have wasted a boatload of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars and not delivered – all while the much cheaper, less environmentally disruptive solution, Starlink, that could be implemented almost immediately after a decision to take advantage of it had been made sat and still sits waiting in the wings, aggressively ignored.
How bad/corrupt was/is this decision to not use Starlink? An Associated Press story ran last week titled, Vermont Broadband Board Outlines $180M Funding Proposal, With Major Investment in NEK. $180 million. This is touted in the article as a “once in a generation investment…” apparently forgetting the fact that just in this generation the Obama Administration gave Vermont $116 million to build out broadband, and the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) poured $150 into the CUDs – and these ‘investments’ did not deliver. But let’s get back to just this latest $180 million proposal.
Today, you can find a Starlink standard kit on sale for less than $200 (and have it delivered in three days or pick it up yourself same day.) So, for $180 million we could buy 900,000 of these – one for every single Vermonter with over a quarter million units left over for us to give as Christmas gifts to friends and family in other states. More fun with the calculator function on my phone, if we bought every household in Vermont (about 240,000) a Starlink set up, it would cost just $48 million. But if we’re only talking about the 10,000 addresses across seventy-two Northeast Kingdom towns this $180 million is supposed to serve, Starlink could cover that nut for less than $2 million – a savings of $178 million.
“But NOOOOOOO!” to quote the late, great John Belushi.
Christina Hallquist, who now chairs the Vermont Community Broadband board for a cool $150K a year, poopooed the idea of Starlink back in 2021 when former Chief Technology Officer for the State of Vermont, Tom Evslin, first recommended it, and continues to poopoo it today. According to the AP article, Hallquist said of providers like Starlink, “’We defined them as a non-priority technology,’ and the state will use low Earth orbit satellites only where the cost for ground technology exceeds $17,000 for a single location.”
That’s insane. This bureaucrat will only consider a $200 solution to a problem that can be installed within 24 hours by the homeowner in cases where the inexcusably inefficient preferred policy costs more than $17,000 and could potentially take years of digging ditches and clearing trees with fossil fuel guzzling machines across a thousand miles of Vermont landscape to complete – if they ever do. I hope this is just corruption, because nobody could actually be this stupid or incompetent.
Thankfully because of a federal rule change the $119 million grant (your federal tax dollars) that the Community Broadband board is applying for (the rest of the $180 million would come from private and state funds – aka your Vermont tax dollars) is now open for a direct competitive bid by Starlink, and according to the AP, Starlink has applied. Good!
Let’s hope they win the bid. Because those freshman students tapping McDonald’s WiFi to do their homework five years ago have graduated by now. Our politicians have failed them, and there is no indication another $180 million wasted on political nest-feathering will change anything for the current generation or the next.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: Commentary, State Government
I vote corruption.
Why choose between stupid or corrupt? I say they are stupid AND corrupt.
Definitely sounds like corruption and looming kickbacks, since at that time Elon Musk was still a Democrat darling
Quote today from Elon Musk: “The U.S. Government is unfixable”. Meanwhile in Nepal, the citizens realized that their government is unfixable. They took matters into their own hands yesterday. Michael J Hall
Matt Tiibbi just used a phrase that astutely describes the mind set of many of today’s progressive politicians and their supporters.
Monomaniacal madness.
Monomaniacal refers to a condition in which someone is extremely focused on one particular thing, often to an unhealthy degree. It is related to monomania, which is a mental illness characterized by an intense obsession with a single idea or area of thought. It’s the only explanation I’ve come across to describe Vermont’s current legislative myopia.
And it’s not a new phenomenon. In the early 1990s, when two colleagues and I founded one of Vermont’s first internet providers, the State (using our tax dollars of course) decided to compete with us by founding a government owned and operated internet company called Gov.net. Vermont invested $10 Million into its internet venture while my colleagues and I capitalized our company (called SoVer.net at the time) with $100 thousand. Long story short… Gov.net failed miserably. SoVer.net became Vermont’s largest privately held internet/telco business.
Today SoVer.net is a part of the FirstLight Fiber organization. And still the Vermont State legislature remains obsessed with trying to control anything and everything whenever a shiny new object enters its view. Starlink, being associated with Elon Musk, who is associated with President Trump, is just the latest iteration of the legislature’s monomaniacal mental disorder.
I agree wholly with Rob Roper. There is no other explanation for this behavior. Be it public education, healthcare, or communications, the Vermont legislature has a monomaniacal vision of grandeur. As do the voters who continue to elect them. And despite all of the names they call us when we criticize their behavior and policy, we must continue to call them out until they see the light… if they ever will.
Thank you, Rob for pointing out, once again, the madness that is Vermont’s State legislature. Sooner than later, hopefully, voters will extricate themselves from this madness too.
Right on, Jay.
However, I would also add one more item to your list along with the ones you mentioned of public education, healthcare, and communications. I would add public safety to the list.
But rather than a monomaniacal vision of grandeur being the motivator for the stupid ideologies and actions of the Vermont legislature, I would attribute it to a monomaniacal vision of miserable chaos and intentional societal destruction.
I’m not a fan of Starlink, simply because it saturates the skies with thousands of satellites (politics aside). I’m also not a fan of our VT government wasting millions of dollars that could have SOLVED our broadband problem.
Too many satellites? The only alternatives, for now at least, are more surface wires (underground, underwater, and on poles), or microwave transceivers… other than (😊) going back to carrier pigeons, the pony express, smoke signals, and drums, I suppose.
So, let’s not give our legislators any more cockamamie ideas, or we may next hear about mandatory mental telepathy classes put on the teacher’s union.
The one thing missing is the monthly cost of starlink compared to dsl or fiber. Anyone researched and would care to share?
It’s less than Comsolidated for Basic and 1000000+ more reliable!
Our home FINALLY got service in 2016 from Comcast, which has a no-compete agreement in the state. $108/month.
This after years of trying to get service, 0.3 miles off a state highway.
I asked our District Commisar, on a zoom call, “Why don’t we do something like New Hampshire SB 107, that allows towns to request bids from ISPs?”
Her answer: “That’s not how we do things in Vermont.”
A big part of my Awakening.
Regardless of the technical or cost advantages of Starlink, Vermont officials would never endorse anything coming from Elon Musk. Leftists always put ideology over practicality.
The $17k/location is not accurate. Early on the VCBB was using this as a maximum for any location, not an average. Since then, we have reduced that number significantly. The VCBB’s average cost of service for the BEAD program is less that 1/2 of that number. At approximately $7k depreciated over 25 years (the accepted investment timeframe for the fiber optic infrastructure), it amounts to $23/month. When you roll in all business costs, the total revenue required is far below the $120/month that Starlink charges. As far as Starlink goes, that would be a bad investment of taxpayer money. Why rent space on a satellite when we can build timeless fiber infrastructure? Starlink is better than nothing, however very limited compared to fiber optic infrastructure. About 1/2 the locations we evaluated cannot get the service due to heavy tree cover and/or geographic shadowing. The beam area for each satellite is 100 Kilometers, which can only support 7 locations with the bandwidth required. The ground stations use radio frequency to communicate with the satellites. Radio Frequencies are limited in bandwidth as compared to fiber. The downlink communications fail during heavy precipitation. Low Earth Orbit satellites are a very expensive to maintain as compared to fiber optic technology. This means consumers pay hefty prices for their monthly bill. Those high monthly bills are necessary in order for the providers to have a sustainable business case. In the short and long run, fiber optics are the least expensive by far as compared to any other telecommunications technology. Fiber optics are a fused network, meaning there are no interconnections that lose signal or fail. When I worked in electric utilities, we were using fiber that was over 50 years old and still performed flawlessly. From a taxpayer investment, fiber optics are the best use of taxpayer money. I will remind you that, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the United States spent twice what we do today in terms of GDP on infrastructure. If we want America to be great, let’s get back to well thought out infrastructure investments. I would be happy to publicly discuss our strategy, as well as provide the math and physics in any public forum.
The American Society of Civil Engineers data is referenced to the 1960’s when public investment in infrastructure was recognized as an important economic engine.
The best arbiter of cost analysis is a free market… because technology changes and is often disruptive.
While I agree that fiber is, for now at least, more efficient with regard to return on investment vs. risk, low earth orbiting satellite technology is improving exponentially over a short period of time. Which technology is best suited to serve the public depends on who and where the public is at any given point in time… which also changes quickly.
If policy is determined, and then assigned through regulatory capture and government subsidy, based on today’s technology, development of tomorrow’s technology will suffer. If the VCBB (VT Community Broadband Board) wants to advocate for a specific technology, do what I did back in the early to mid-1990s when I co-founded Sovernet. Raise capital privately, invest in your process, and let the market determine the successful contenders.
This is not an either-or proposition. Technology has been, and will continue, developing at break-neck speed. No single person or association can possibly predict its future. The government tried to compete with me back in the 1990s, again, using my taxpayer dollars to do so, and failed. And if the dystopian performance of current government entities, be they in education, healthcare, safety, energy or communication, is to be reasonably judged, the public is well advised as follows… Caveat emptor.
The problem with this response is that we are dealing with the laws of physics. In our known universe, nothing exceeds the ability of light for efficiency and bandwidth. We are still dealing with the costly limitations of radio frequency to communicate with satellites, not to mention the atmospheric limitations of going out to space and back. Add to that the national security concerns of using satellites. For reference, 37 state Adjutant Generals have signed on to the National Integration of Time for the Resilience of Operations where they have identified the need for fiber networks versus the use of satellites due to these limitations.
With all due respect, Christine Hallquist, I will repeat my position… this is not an either/or consideration (i.e., you’re making a false dichotomy).
The Nationwide Integration of Time Resiliency for Operations (NITRO) is a collaborative initiative calling for emergency system redundancy, not the monopoly control of all private communications. NITRO is a fledgling initiative intended to mitigate risks from Global Navigation Satellite Systems vulnerabilities to military operations, emergency management, and critical infrastructure.
It is not intended to ensure that every farmhouse in Vermont has broadband access.
In fact, NITRO does not directly protect fiber optic networks in terms of physical or cybersecurity measures. Even while its provision of ‘resilient timing’ (we’re getting into the weeds here) could support the operational continuity of systems that rely on fiber optic networks for synchronized data transmission, it’s all hypothetical at this point.
NITRO focuses on timing and navigation resilience, not on protecting broader infrastructure (e.g., power grids, fiber-optic networks, or communication systems) from EMP damage, for example.
Again, we’re talking about retail communications for consumers. Using NITRO as a pretext for directing Vermont taxpayer dollars into monopolized commercial fiber optic networks will result in the same dysfunction we see in the other government-run institutions I mentioned above. Your proposal is just another centralized ‘Emergency Use Authorization’ scheme to control the flow of money without financial accountability. Again, let the market determine what’s best for consumers. Let the military protect itself. These are two entirely different considerations.
Let me begin by saying I, like most people, view things through a rather simplistic “what does this mean and how does it affect me and those around me?” filter. Another filter distinguishes realisim from idealism.
Many of us living here in the NEK do not have hardwired internet. You might ask why is this? Internet service is provided by private businesses. It does not make economic sense for those businesses to provide service to sparsely populated areas, one of which is my road. Realisticly running miles of cable to serve 6 homes that might subscribe will simply never recoup the initial investment let alone cover maintenence costs. Yes, in a day and age where reliable, high speed internet is now a necessity, homes are left unserved.
In my case my initial and only viable option for internet was via the phone lines. To be kind, it was terrible. My, and my neighbors, solution came about when a cell phone provider’s coverage improved to a point their home internet became available. At a price far better than cable or satellite. Should my road ever be wired for cable will I subscribe? Why would I?
As low orbit satellite coverage continues to grow wireless options plans and prices continue to expand and improve. Why are providers moving into wireless and satellite technology? What can they posssible know that Montpelier does not? Currently while internet via a cell service provider still doesn’t reach everyone Starlink does for very little money. Why would we possibly consider spending thousands and thousands of dollars to maybe connect a home to cable when it could be done for a $200? As quoted above, “That’s not how we do business in Vermont”. Against this backdrop how does spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run cable best serve the near term need, to say nothing of long term viability? Follow the money, follow the money.
From my viewpoint there is nothing more dangerous than an idealist unfettered by realisim and the pesky notions of logic and common sense. Add to this unhealthy doses of ego, and not my idea coupled with an
inability to admit an idea might be flawed when presented with incontrovertible facts. Yet another idealistic state government agency believing it knows how to better create and manage a service than existing successful, market driven private sector enterprises has to be the answer. Surely this time it will be different.