The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Lamont praised for broadband plan
Officials representing towns across the state as well as educators and political leaders are welcoming Gov. Ned Lamont’s move to introduce legislation that would make broadband and high speed internet services more widely available as well as cheaper in Connecticut.
Alarmed that 23 percent of Connecticut residents don’t have access to internet service of any kind, Lamont said the goal of his ambitious legislation is for the state to have universal broadband service by 2022. Bethel First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker lauded Lamont’s efforts, but said the problem of widespread access to affordable high speed internet is nothing new.
“The digital divide is something that muncipalties have been talking about for 20 years,” Knickerbocker said. “It has moved from being a luxury to a necessity for the public good. This is very, very necessary in our world today.”
Contacted after Lamont’s virtual press event Tuesday, Knickerbocker said while broadband access is available throughout most of Bethel, “the challenge here is more socio-economic, families that can’t afford it.”
“We have issued vouchers through our social services department for those families that can’t afford any (broadband access),” he said. “And our school district supplies (internet) hot spots as well.”
The problem of access to broadband internet is just as acute in the cities as it is Connecticut’s more rural communities, two state representatives said.
“We have so many children who were not able to connect to the internet when this started that still can not connect,” said State Rep. Bobby Sanchez, DNew Britain.
State Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury, has a district that encompasses nine communities in northwest Connecticut. Horn called access to high speed internet “the road to the 21st century.”
“Ths isn’t just about the unserved, but the underserved,” she said. “Before the pandemic, a lot of people in these towns didn’t really know what it meant to be underserved. Now they do.
Virtually every town in northwest Connecticut has a committee whose responsibility is to explore how to improve high speed internet service, according to Horn.
Don Stein, first selectman in Barkhamsted, said a consortium of 25 towns in that geographic area of the state has formed Northwest Connecticut, a group that is looking at the potential benefits of fiber optics for the region.
“What you have right now is a wide variation in terms of the service provided by the companies,” Stein said. “With what the cable companies offer, if everybody in your neighborhood is using the internet, you’re going to have a tough time getting the speed you need.”
Barkhamsted officials did a survey about internet service that got over 200 responses from residents of the town, he said.
“People weren’t overly dissatisfied with their service,” Stein said. “But they were very interested in saving money.”
Stein said he pays Stamford-based Charter Communications $105 per month for high speed internet and land line telephone service. He said officials in small towns located in the Massachusetts’ Berkshires pay between $80 and $100 for the same services that brought in to lay their own fiber optic cable, which is necessary for ultra-high speed internet.
“They didn’t have an before that,” Stein said.
He said that while Lamont is “doing the right thing” with his proposed legislation, elected officials in Connecticut’s northwest corner “are concerned that he doesn’t understand the seriousness of the situation we’re in.”
Betsy Gara, executive director for The Connecticut Council of Small Towns said Lamont’s proposed legislation, if approved by both chambers of the General Assembly, will “address Connecticut’s broadband needs by streamlining the process for connecting high speed cable to utility poles.”
Guilford Superintendent Paul Freeman, chairman of the state’s Learn From Home Task Force, said improved high speed internet access, is “absolutely essential for education.”
“The digital divide has affected students for the past several years by making it difficult to do research,” Freeman said. “Digital learning is not going to go away.”
Officials in Essex give the Connecticut Education Network’s fiber optic system high marks, said Lon Seidman, chairman of the town’s Board of Education. The district has been conducting in-person classes since October after using a hybrid model at the start of the school year.
“It has been very good for our district,” said Seidman. “If the state can leverage that expertise in other areas, what the Governor is proposing could be very effective.”
A spokeswoman for one of the state’s largest internet providers as well as a trade group official representing telecommunications and cable telecommunications companies that provide broadband were quick to respond to Lamont’s aninternet nouncement. They defended what they have done to expand broadband access in service territories across the state.
Lara Pritchard, a Charter Communications spokeswoman, said company officials “have not seen the details of Gov. Lamont’s proposal yet, but welcome a focus on streamlining the utility pole attachment process to help expand broadband access, especially in rural areas.”
“We recently partnered with the Lamont Administration’s ‘Everybody Learns’ Initiative to provide broadband service to Connecticut students for remote learning in our state service area, and are working to close the digital divide in several important ways,” Pritchard said.
Tim Wilkerson, president of the Massachusettsbased New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, said Connecticut already “has a worldclass network that even during the pandemic, was ready and able to handle the surge from working, learning, streaming and connecting at home.”
“When it comes to ranking public access to broadband networks, Connecticut has been consistently among the top five U.S. states for over a decade,” Wilkerson said. “BroadbandNow also states that 99.1 percent of Connecticut has access to broadband of 100 mbps or faster, which is well beyond what the average user needs to work, learn and stream, and on multiple devices.”
Connecticut’s broadband system was upgraded through $2 billion of investments by cable companies over the last seven years, he said.
“The upgrades and investments to build this great broadband system is not a one-time event, it’s an evolution that will continue through decades,” Wilkerson said.