Bills to Bar State Hand in Broadband a Risk to Maine, Applicant Says
The University of Maine isn’t trying to compete with private telcos or hold them back, including by taking part in an NTIA-funded broadband project, a university official said. “We're trying to help promote a competitive telecommunications environment -- and get our telecom needs met,” said Jeff Letourneau, associate director for communications and network services. Implementation of bills to keep the university and other state institutions from participating in the NTIA-funded project or similar efforts “would hurt the state,” said Fletcher Kittredge, CEO of Great Works Internet, the company whose name appeared on the BTOP grant application.
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Both men were commenting on a bill to be considered by state legislators in the current session that would bar state bodies from delivering telecom services beyond those needed by themselves and their tenants. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Stacey Fitts, R-Pittsfield, has said it’s more important to preserve the state’s legacy copper system and carriers than for the university to take part, as planned, in Great Works Internet’s $24.5 million Broadband Technology Opportunities Program project (CD Jan 11 p11).
Legislators in Maine have shown “huge support” for the university’s efforts to use broadband to bring high-speed online parity to the far-flung outposts that serve some of its 42,000 students, Letourneau said. He noted that in 2007 the Legislature voted to direct $3 million to the university for expanding its fiber network as far as Cambridge, Mass., to connect with other institutions. “The idea is to get all our campuses on a level playing field,” Letourneau said: “There are misconceptions floating around about the university being the recipient of this BTOP grant. That’s not the case.”
The university system is among partners allying with broadband grant applicant Great Works Internet, which stood in on the NTIA submission for Maine Fiber Co., which is in the process of being incorporated. Maine Fiber will build the 1,100-mile project. Unless Fitts’ bill becomes law, the university will participate in the project, Letourneau said. “We hope to get a chance to lease dark fiber from Maine Fiber Company, so that our institutions in the rural parts of the state can be on par with the urban campuses,” he said.
Maine Fiber had its genesis in a last-minute flurry of debate as the Aug. 14 deadline for the first round of BTOP grants was nearing, Great Works’ Kittredge told us. Until then a group of private telcos and other companies, including Great Works, was weighing how to contribute the capital needed to amass the requisite $7 million in matching funds for the dark fiber middle-mile project covered in the application to NTIA. At the 11th hour, negotiations broke down. Kittredge said “it all came down to a dispute over control.”
With only days before the NTIA deadline, a member of the Great Works board offered to provide the $7 million to fund a new company, Maine Fiber Co., that would build and administer the network, onto which each participant would put its own equipment. All contracts would be made public, no one would be refused a connection and charges would be based on cost, with the investor providing the $7 million getting a return, Kittredge said. “What it looks like is an old-fashioned utility,” he said.
To fill in the blank on the NTIA application, Great Works Internet offered its name. “But Maine Fiber Co. is going to get the grant,” Kittredge said. “All that remains is to memorialize that Maine Fiber will do as prescribed in the filing to the NTIA. Great Works will be a customer, as, I hope, will other companies.”
Kittredge said he understands the perceptions behind legislative efforts to bar state institutions from the broadband business, but said he thinks the only party that would be harmed by enactment would be the state itself. “They're sticking it to the university,” he said. “But it wouldn’t affect us, or the Three-Ring Binder network. If state entities were not allowed to own any infrastructure, how could they buy services? They'd be paying much, much more for those services. …. These bills wouldn’t hurt anyone but the state and the university.”