 Welcome to the first session of the public input for the public comment draft of the 2024 10-year telecom plan. I think I fit all those words in there correctly. So in this meeting what we will do is Alex will present a, or I guess we can go to the next slide and go over the agenda. Sure. And we want to start recording. Oh yeah, I'm sorry also this meeting is going to be recorded so that we can turn any verbal comments into written comments so that we'll have them. Turn on transcribe too. Yep transcribe and record it. The recording will be posted to the website. We should wait to hear that. We don't get an audio, somebody's got it muted. We are now recording. Alright so this meeting is going to be recorded and transcribed. The recording will be posted to the website most likely tomorrow morning when I get back into the office with my computer. Just so everybody is aware. So again this is the first meeting of the public comment session for the public comment draft of the 10-year telecom plan. So the format of this meeting is we're here to solicit input. This is not necessarily a large open conversation where we're going to have a back and forth. But the plan has been out there. It's been posted to the website and we would like to hear your comments on the plan statutorily. They'll be included in the plan and we will provide some kind of response to them. So can we go to the next slide? We'll go over the agenda real quick. So basically what's going to happen is I'm going to stop talking in a minute and Alex is going to go over and give a rough slide deck of what is included in the 10-year telecom plan. I would like to ask people to keep their comments initially to three minutes if possible. After everybody has had a chance to go we will open the floor back up for longer extended comments as appropriate. We're all adults here. Let's all make sure we keep it polite and civil as we move forward. And with that I will turn it over to Alex and hopefully I didn't miss anything. No that was great. Thank you Hunter. So just a few quick other housekeeping things before we begin. So I'm going to walk through this deck that shares some of the highlights of the 10-year plan. It is impossible to completely summarize the plan in a slide deck. And so please don't take this to be exclusive or exhaustive of what's in the plan. I'm hoping that if you're providing comment you get a chance to read the plan in the original document but in order to spark thinking and just remind folks who are watching what the plan contains we're going to go over this deck. The second thing is if you have comments in writing that you're going to read from today it would help us out if you also sent those to us via email then we could include those directly but as Hunter mentioned we'll also be taking a transcription. So next slide please Harley. So a little bit of context about this particular plan the 2024 plan. As always the plan is guided by the telecommunications goals listed in statute and this plan provides analysis and recommendations to support the state's efforts in achieving those goals. It's also the entire process of the plan is laid out in statute as well and so this plan follows that process. The moment of time when it when it is happening in 2024 is notable because we are in the midst of a significant amount of federal resources being provided to the state to target certain types of broadband deployments. And so the intent of the 2024 plan is to build on the momentum created by all of those resources from ARPA Capital Projects Fund and the BEAD Fund Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. And some of those federal resources come with very strict and prescribed rules about how the state can use them. And so and a and those resources also require a separate planning process and a parallel planning process that happened during the creation of this plan. And so the other piece of important context is that this plan has follow statute and addresses all of the statutory requirements. However it also places a special focus on elements that are not being addressed in the simultaneous BEAD planning that is being required by the federal government. And that's just to be efficient with resources and to provide a deeper perspective on some of the items that are not already being addressed in parallel. Next slide please. So a robust amount of qualitative and quantitative research underpins the analysis and recommendations in the plan. A quick selection of that is as follows. The plan as part of the plan we did a landline and cell phone survey of a statistically significant sampling of Vermont residents. We also surveyed Vermont businesses, healthcare professionals and public safety professionals via online surveys. We interviewed it's actually closer to 60 at this point stakeholders. We did a statewide mobile wireless engineering and cover coverage analysis. We did a really robust analysis called an input output analysis that allows us to understand the gaps in the workforce in the state of Vermont related to broadband construction. There's obviously more in the plan but this is a highlight a section of highlights I think of pieces of research that are important to note going into this. Next slide. Great. So I'll go through a selection of the findings that we think are important and salient to the recommendations. On the next slide we have a finding that perhaps is the most obvious because we've seen it happening all around us right fiber coverage is expanding rapidly in the state. It's expanding so fast that the data sources we have to even understand it can't keep up because it's construction is constantly happening. So the household with access to 100 meg symmetrical doubled between 2021 and 2023. Vermont is on track to pass all on grid premises by 2029 with 100 symmetrical fiber. Related to this fiber expansion our analysis determined that Vermont really needs to grow its broadband construction workforce. The sector had been shrinking prior to 2022 and if we've got an estimated up to 700 million dollars of fiber deployment still ahead of us you know the workforce is going to need to grow by about 750 across a number of occupational categories. A couple other findings. One thing that many stakeholders noted was that fiber infrastructure's owners may need to bury portions of the network in the next 10 to 15 years as part of utility hardening and becoming more resilient to climate change. And the process and costs and protocols associated with that are not clear and a number of stakeholders really desire clarity around how that's going to work, how that will be coordinated and if there's a role for the state to play to coordinate more efficiency on that front. Another important finding just related to the state's efforts to achieve the goal of universal fiber deployment is that the agency of transportation is no longer issuing right-of-way permit waivers which they had been doing for a while in for infrastructure builders and unserved areas to ease the economics of deploying in the really rural areas. Next slide. So a couple interesting findings on the mobile wireless service. So you know stakeholders reiterated how important the service was. You know 80% of businesses indicated that they did not think that the Vermont's mobile wireless coverage is adequate for their business needs and a clear majority of residents strongly agreed that the state should use public funds to improve mobile wireless coverage. And while mobile download speeds have increased quite significantly since 2018 coverage areas have seen almost no improvements. So there's actually little to no expansion of service areas happening in the last five years. Another but lastly an important finding from the engineering analysis is that we looked at the entirety of the gaps in the state and the analysis showed that strategically placed small wireless facilities which we measured at 50 feet can make significant progress towards closing a good portion of the coverage gaps right. So in comparison we did a similar analysis for more traditional 140 foot towers and while you know while the efficiency of those 140 foot towers is notable for the hardest of serve areas the point of this analysis was that it actually demonstrated that Vermont could make significant progress with smaller facilities at least for the easiest to serve areas that currently don't have coverage from any provider. Next slide. Affordability is obviously critical and during the creation of this plan it was it came about that the affordable connectivity program at the federal level is sunsetting due to a lack of funding. You know that program provided $30 a month subsidy for about 24,000 Vermonters to either help them with their mobile wireless bill or their fixed coverage and we some interesting stats about how critical affordability is. For example 16% of respondents under the age of 45 reported that the cost of their mobile bill often are always impacts essential items and you know participation in the ACP was notable especially among certain populations who really needed that coverage. Another lastly finding related to mobile broadband affordability is healthcare workers we surveyed noted that without continuous mobile coverage and access devices unhoused Vermonters have a lot harder time accessing care. Next slide. Public safety was component of this 10-year plan as everyone knows mobile coverage was a big theme in those conversations as well. Due to conversations happening in the legislature we also spent a lot of ink discussing the pros and cons of public safety answering point consolidation the advantages and disadvantages from a coverage and process standpoint the advantages being you know some increased staffing flexibility resources for statewide and more emergencies and potentially long-term cost savings right disadvantages include a big startup cost to switch the systems over you know a reduction in local knowledge due to the fact that people answering may not be from that area and you need to establish new redundancy and failure process. So anyways it's a big section in the plan please do check it out if you haven't if you want to comment on this. In other finding stakeholders reported that look that we've got a statewide communication interoperability plan and while there are some federal grant resources available to work on some of those pieces it's a lack of funding at the state level has been a big barrier to executing on those goals. And then lastly you know over 50 FirstNet sites have been deployed some new construction and others kind of upgrades to existing facilities which is good progress that being said only five percent of the public safety survey respondents reported never losing mobile service on the job. Lastly under the direction of some of the stakeholders we interviewed and especially the JITOC committee we did take a look at the statutes governing the plan in and of themselves and a few different recommendations one you know the broadband speed definitions and deployment parameters are starting to lag behind other states and there's some there's some kind of slight misalignment across statute you know the statutorily mandated end date for the Vermont Community Broadband Board you know we feel might be too soon because there are bead program activities that are likely to happen after that date and then we we spent a lot of time discussing some of the statutory goals which were first drafted 40 years ago and we have a recommendation that the legislature revisit those goals and clarify them and add some more specificity to them. So now I think we're into the summary of some of our recommendations. Move ahead. So we have some recommendations about how the state can take some actions to make wire line deployment more efficient again some of this is dictated by federal statute that's attached to the bead funding that the state has available but nevertheless there are things the state can do. We recommend reinstating the agency of transportation permit fee waivers which will help reduce the challenge of economics of deploying rural areas you know we you know we appreciate and commend the workforce training that's going on in the state already but that does need to be scaled to accommodate the amount of construction that will need to happen and you know calibrated based on that the gaps that we identified in our analysis and then lastly the state is in a is in the position where they should be the ones driving clarity around the the future process of burying infrastructure as utilities underground their infrastructure over the next 15 years and you know that part of driving clarity around that will will mean understanding the potential impact to ISP and fiber infrastructure owner financials and their business plans and also providing a central coordination role to create savings and align people all working on this to be as efficient as possible. We feel that to start making progress on wireless mobile wireless gaps that the state should deploy what we're calling a pilot grant program and this grant program we recommend focusing on those small wireless facilities that again can make meaningful and efficient coverage progress in the state while also you know not not having as much of an impact on the landscape as 140 foot towers do we recommend a two to three million dollar initial pilot program here the the the plan has detailed recommendations about what we think that pilot program should look like but a may a critical piece of it is collecting certain pieces of data to then refine it because this is a an effort that the state that will be new for the state to some degree. We also have a number of recommendations about data collection practices writ large and ways that the state can strengthen their planning abilities to better measure progress including repetition of mobile broadband drive tests using the same methodology done in 2022 the establishment of a crowdsourced drive test framework to collect data on the roads that the that the the the previous drive test did not collect and then a slight change in the 248a data collection process which would be to request that permit recipients notify the public service department upon completion of tower builds. Affordability has a number of recommendations in that section a couple highlights here we recommend using a two percent of monthly income benchmark as a definition of affordable for fixed and mobile broadband spending for low income Vermonters we have charts extrapolating what that means in the plan and to really allow Vermonters to have both a mobile and a fixed subscription which stakeholders you know overwhelmingly said was necessary for was necessary for Vermonters. We believe a state run subsidy program should provide $67 a month to support those both of those types of subscriptions and we also believe that a fully subsidized mobile device and mobile subscription program for unhoused Vermonters in particular would would really benefit that population and ensure continued access to services. So again the big theme of some of the emergency communications is you know that they have there's a plan in place for how to increase the resiliency of those systems and evolve those systems there are pieces that simply need to be funded and then on the public safety answering point discussion you know if the stakeholders support taking another step down the path of consolidation based on the analysis provided in the plan we recommend performing a detailed kind of consolidation plan to go in great depth as to what the costs would be for that and the process to do that and then lastly we provided some recommendations to modernized statutes so you know again there needs to be an exercise in aligning the 202c and d with x71 there's a little there's a few pieces that are not fully harmonized we do believe that the Vermont community broadband board sunset date should be extended and there are ways in which the statutory goals should be updated just one example here you know there's a goal of competition in the state that was set quite some time ago and there's a way to update this goal to reflect the practices that the state has been promoting by changing the goal to reflect what the intended outcomes of competition are namely faster speeds lower cost better customer service rather than competition itself so that's just one example of ways that the statutory goals could be updated and made more specific based on the strategies that the state is currently taking i think that is the end of the presentation so now we are at the at the time when anyone who wants to share thoughts on the plan may and we will ask that you keep your comments to three minutes to start until everyone has had a chance to go so probably folks on the phone if you would like to raise your hand um and then we can call on you as you want to comment just so we're not all talking over each other look now see so we're here for another 38 minutes anyway so yeah they can unmute and there's a there's a raise your hand function on there where it'll like a little virtual hand go up that's true if you dial in all these people are connected in with teams otherwise they would just be telephone numbers okay you want to get started i was hoping not to go first or last but i um i think just to set the tone which i will change later i want to commend a couple of sections of the plan the analysis of the importance and the challenges of developing carrier grade service on our fiber infrastructure or on the new built fiber infrastructure is very good unfortunately it's done in the context of expecting CUDs to do that which is almost laughable um had a open access statutory compliance been built into the CUD plans from the start as is required by current statute not the statute we're hoping will be someday then i could imagine carrier grade service providers jumping on and leasing the circuits they need to the points they need them to and developing carrier grade services that is probably the only way we're going to get carrier grade out of this uh this ties somewhat together with the study of burying if they're currently piloting the direct burial with big mountain power but yet the cost to add a conduit where they're already got the ditch open we're so exorbitant for fiber to go in that it was waived the opportunity was waived in the pilot and then another section of underground yet to be done uh was going to require hundreds of thousands in the replacement poles and bell vans decides they'll just charge that amount to drop the conduit in so i believe that if we're going to do a study of direct burial communications and fiber in the same operation as direct burial of the green mountain power electric it's going to have to be regulated like a raid case and it's that plan is long overdue because now all the CUDs have aerial plans which it may be too late to uh switch horses so um the neutral host uh analysis or i haven't seen the actual propagation analysis but the analysis that so many lower poles in a small cell arrangement i think is a smart idea and could work better in vermont again the assumption that the CUDs would own build and manage those is a is a fallacy CUDs could barely uh in any case i'll uh refrain this the this CUD myopic uh draft uh aspect of this draft is i believe a result of the same firm writing the plan which is the same firm that wrote the last plan and failed on nine out of ten statutory requirements is also doing the engineering work for the CUD within the department for the CUD plan review within the department so some of this you know future projections is kind of self-serving self-serving make work for you know the department and ctc to have further uh butter for their bread but i'm going to point to some of the flaws in the process i read the statute very literally and i'm familiar with it for 30 years now um and what's prior to preparing the plan an overview looking 10 years ahead of statewide growth and development as they relate to future telecommunication service that's missing that's not in here uh shifts in transportation modes economic development technological advances that's not in here the factors that will significantly affect state telecommunications policy programs that's not in here the overview shall include economic demographic forecast sufficient to determine infrastructure investments goals and objectives that's not in here that's prior to preparing a plan so you've really gotten out ahead of yourselves in preparing a draft without reading what the precursors are um the surveys are pretty good but i question the statistically significant self the number of people that were surveyed i'd like i'd have to talk to somebody who knows survey methodology better than i to see what's appropriate for this kind of scale uh we used to have hundreds of people in the 90s we had hundreds of people participating in this planning process and it's the department's failure to write a plan failure to properly promulgate it failure to hold hearings on a final draft failure to even draft a plan for several of the generations under oh brian and douglas uh that has caused this capacity of the public to atrophy and so when i read that uh in developing the department shall establish a participatory planning process that includes effective provisions for increased public participation this doesn't cut it you know three meetings with one or two people at them is not anywhere close to what you're you need to be doing to draft such an important document that's if all the homework were done first and put out for review so uh to the extent necessary i guess that's i want and who's just in whose determination the department shall include in the plant surveys to determine existing needed and desirable plant improvements and extensions access and coordination between telecommunications providers methods of operation and any changes that will produce better service or reduce cost those are things that this contractor is to embed with the CUDs and their plans to even think outside the box you know this this broadband money uh was on had we we had one good model with wek and cv fiber for a time i was integrally involved with cv fiber and that fell apart because this easy money made it too easy to go and just take the money and not worry about not worry about wek getting a low interest r us low so the poll owning utilities in order both for resilience planning for public safety and carrier grade capacity and the ability to rapid restore all that having the skilled technicians in in state and readily at hand and ready and prepared and expecting a storm with their trucks and tools and parts loaded is not going to happen the way we've gone about it we've gone about it with a bunch of out of state especially consolidated a bunch of out of state nine union fly-by-night contractors and then they leave town and nobody can even figure out why this you know splitters not lighting up so the poll owning utilities and it may be too late but where we are in the plan i'm i'm going to keep raising it in case there's structural re uh re steering that can be done this poll owning utility should be especially in the underground if we're going to go underground even more so because then we don't have an increased cost of ditching that fiber underground it's going to go in as being out in power buries their own steve yep i wouldn't interrupt you but when you have a moment to pause just so we can check and see if anyone else has any comments yet i'll pause right there even would you be able to just take your full name for the record too sure steve what a girl from i'm on piliar thank you thank you and since i'm doing that i want to point out i would ask people to go look at appendix g of the last ten-year telecom plan and i put pages and pages of constructive and specific recommendations regarding resiliency and public safety needs and it was all just swept off the table whoever was doing that i presume it was cori uh you would know if you were doing it uh i know it wasn't clay so um but my point is if that that's again damaging the public participation if you're going to bother to participate and provide a lot of input and it's just going to get swept off and ignored uh that doesn't bode well for you adhering to statute with your public participation so the poll owning utility should be let's let's make sure no one else on the phone wants to go i think i'm right back to you i thought i just did that okay i don't forget anyone else on the phone have a comment they'd like to to add all right back to you steve thank you so the poll owning utilities are the logical entity to build own and maintain and lease open access fiber competition you know wishful thinking that we're going to get the benefits of competition just by saying we're going to get the benefits of competition with monopolies is is la la land you know the competition creates an incentive of smart teams of people working against each other to drive prices down and drive quality and loyalty up and that's a proven fact again and again and we're in statute says it you can't be writing a plan for a statute you hope to change in years to come and that's what this is this says we're going to plow ahead with a monopoly service we're going to keep all the monopoly arrangements secret between you know weight field based on our gwi and the cd's and we're going to grant huge new footprints to monopolies we're not going to address here's a gap the vulnerability of unpowered lines for landlines is increasing dramatically as we shift to fiber and there's been a puc docket on it which the department your department sabotaged and nothing came out of it oh we're just going to teach people to maintain batteries it's like that's that's a joke old people are not going to go in their basement and check on batteries to see if they're too old to be reliant upon during a storm uh we need strategies to make emergency calling available via fixed wireless that's hardened backhaul to public safety grade that can be reached with a short walk from most of the resonances or we need to maintain a copper but this reliability we just we see this pages and pages of propaganda about first net and yet no no mention of the massive outage on February 22 which took down all AT&T service nationwide including first net and no one can answer why and the investigation will be secret the after action report will be secret no mention of how first net could fail over with priority and preemption to other carriers in a neutral host model that we design and implement properly not relying on CUDs that's that's putting way too much faith and and confidence in CUDs so um I heard the goals were drafted four years ago these goals have been drafted and uh 20 years ago 30 years 87 is when our this statute requiring this plan was first passed and then the it was about 10 years ago it was 10 years ago that we put the 100 to 100 by 2024 in place and here it is 2024 so let's move it to 2029 I'm like if we had had this plan in place when the ARPA money came or not this plan but a real plan when the ARPA money got here we might have made some progress and we might have even made it by 2025 because the B money's coming out slower right um we got covered most covered the costs oh little to no service area expansion in southern last five years and yet we say oh AT&T's got 50 new towers uh AT&T definitely defrauded the state with their promises and they were caught when we the state paid Tel Aviv to go measure the coverage down in in in Bennington County and the coverage wasn't there and AT&T basically told the state pound sand we measure it differently take it up with Washington we don't answer to you and that's that's why we shouldn't be advertising for them in in this pretending that they're the only game in town with priority and prevention no mention that Verizon has priority and prevention that any first responder can sign up and scan their card credential and get priority and prevention turned on you know and what of a neutral host model where multiple carriers can have priority and prevention and fail over to each other in a disaster where any one carrier goes down I mean that's what we that's what would be a plan so um I don't understand what is being said I my pillar was encouraged to bow out of ec fiber we were a founding member of ec fiber we were encouraged to bow out of ec fiber and let cv fiber instead nobody built fiber until consolidated got here and now nobody will build fiber they see that cv's were not allowed to build in cabled areas where 253 was already present is my understanding and yet I'm hearing that we're on track to have 100 megabit symmetric which means fiber to every address in the state and it just doesn't add up to me there's something I'm not understanding about that representation and it may be couched in the word we're going to pass all on grid premises that might mean that we're not going to have any breakout boxes or any service drops we're just going to have run a long-distance cable through those communities but that doesn't count for every E911 address having 100 100 fiber speed so are we presuming that are we pretending that the cable companies are going to upgrade to doxus 4 and we have 100 100 symmetric but it's already time the telecommunications and connectivity advisory board hasn't met in years and has not provided any advice on upgrading the speed it's time for our base speed to be gigabit symmetric but are we going to have that at every address including the cabled addresses or are we pretending that the cabled addresses or the limitation on the ARPA money gives us a free pass to not provide fiber service to those addresses that's that's a need for clarification here because it doesn't add up that we're not building the CUDs are not designing as far as I know we're not designing the areas that are cable built you're not allowed to use this money for that and yet we're representing that we're on track to have every ongoing address so fiber served and then fiber served with competition I mean the opening chapter the opening paragraph of the plan says uh the department shall be responsible for the revision of plans for meeting emerging trends related to telecommunications technology markets financing and competition you can't just say competition oh that's inconvenient you know that'll make us work harder that'll make us have to design active fiber and ethernet networks instead of passive so that we can with a few keystrokes move somebody to a competitor that can keep the data data turned on so I've got a nice marked up copy of the draft and of the but I don't want to preoccupy this hearing but I think the fact that nobody showed up oh the access media organization the department shall coordinate with Vermont's access media organizations when planning the public hearings required by this subsection that's these hearings this week and next and there's been no coordination with the access media organizations that's why you don't have any turnout here among other things but you need advertising you need radio advertising you need speakers on vpr you know ahead of time to say this is a big underdeal undertaking we're taking on and we need to you know get everybody up to speed here's some homework you can do ahead of time you know here's how to understand this plan that work hasn't been done and you inherited this mess I understand but we we really need to rethink how we're going about it at this point I'm thinking we need to create an amendment to a bill that's moving related to telcom and extend the due date and get this done right and that's not going to be by racy and ctc they're conflicted and they they should pay back the money they collected for the last plan which was not anywhere near close to the contractual terms thank you do you want to submit that writing or do you want us to transcribe that I think it's already transcribed okay and there'll be more we're here two more times and probably a lot more than that we appreciate your input Stephen we're still here for another 18 minutes made the decision that you can't do a back and forth and argue the merits are I think this is uh this is just to solicit the input plan but who made that decision it's not precluded here in statute why is this different than your all your off the record interviews because I scheduled this meeting is just a public input session just so we could collect input more respond to it like I said anything that is uh yeah I want the unvarnished response I don't want the combed and spun you know I mean somebody needs to see what you know or what you don't know and who's pulling who's pulling the puppet strings like I said we'll put it in the plan and we'll respond to it well I have trouble encouraging people to come if they're not going to get any feedback on their concerns during the hearings do you know who the people are HQAT DV and KO I have names on the screen I don't know I don't recognize the name I don't recognize them as uh as cd people all right nice and as uh the two interpreters and everyone else and I'm not sure who Kristen is yeah Kristen is she with you yeah yeah it's an echo so where was this advertised this was advertised on wcax department libraries and the department website press police I looked at the website today there's no thing about the telecom plan or about the hearings on the homepage in fact you got it you got to dig and I actually you couldn't find it all unless you went to the document section of the telecom division that the homepage had nothing about the telecom plan initiated or nothing about the hearings this week was in the announcement sections on the right hand side I don't know where it is now I think some other announcements have been made I'll look at it since then oh it made it pushed off a bit of no glue to our homepage a lot well you probably need some professional help getting the that's what the AMO's were designed I helped write this statute and the AMO's participation was to help get the involved crowd the invested crowd and even the impacted but unknowledgeable who want to get knowledgeable AARP and you know did it was any bulk mailings sent out to any of these groups no we advertise on wcax departmental libraries wc you paid for advertising on cx or you just got them to cover that you were going to happen online they're considered a statewide advertising so if you need to notify the whole state they're considered one of the advertisers that has statewide I don't go to I wouldn't go to there and I'm a pretty media savvy person oh another thing that's missing the whole microwave system is missing while they're marking upon a 90 $9 million upgrade which isn't in the state's ADS plans either but there's an entire public safety task force that is already got a contractor underway who's going to do a PSAP call volume fees analysis and they really need to do it coupled with this it's another reason to slow this uh rickety train down and get it on the right track and that's going to be a year-long process but the amount of knowledge we will have about radio systems the regionally owned radio systems the state owned radio systems that rick the opportunity for cost effective concurrent design and build of LTE and LMR if public safety is going to have to densify their whole network to get p25 working why aren't we putting LTE and LMR neutral hosts on those same polls in order to achieve the most cost effective solution because they're all going to need generators are all going to need fiber backhaul or microwave backhaul but then the statewide microwave system is a huge totally missing from the planet unless it's that reference to you know the state police's LMR backhaul which is both fiber and least fiber but the opportunity to redo the 901 system on a shared high performance network you know there's no reason we couldn't have a network like mellow park and teach people to use it and attract people to come here and build businesses on it but the reason it's not happening is because we can't seem to get a plan together i'll throw another two cents in here um yeah 10 more minutes steven the uh uh look at it sub nine b b nine analysis of alternative strategies to leverage the state's ownership and management of the right away public right away to create opportunities for accelerating the build out of fiber optic broadband and for increasing network resiliency capacity that was the language that was put into act 71 the broadband that created the broadband board that said a statewide engineered resilient design was both allowed and fund fundable with those funds the broadband board chose not to do it on the claim that it would have slowed us down by two years well here we are three years later and it's coming back to to roost that the lack of that statewide design means we're not prepared with the resilience design to know where we would bury fiber with green mountain power to create a carrier grade hurricane proofed core network what role should velcos aerial fiber play what role what's the potential of using similar sienna dense wave division muxes at every c u d home to two different velco muxes to create a backbone that is self healing and or quickly restoreable via even if we have to go through new hampshire new york to get somebody lit back up after a fiber break but that combined with underground fiber strategy to support all the antennas that will be putting up for this public safety initiative would have given us the best bang for the buck and probably come in under budget and so you wouldn't have all the pole make ready costs you wouldn't have all the the pole attachment costs central vermont fiber is four hundred thousand dollars a year for for attachment costs those wouldn't exist if the pole owners built owned and maintained the fiber and just leased that open access c u d's would have a much simpler job how did you get so far off course i could take advantage of this one-way conversation good uh another thing the neutral host analysis for small cells fail to include issue of spectrum you know we first net has 20 megahertz of valuable 700 megahertz spectrum uh details got a lot of 700 the advantage that t mobile has around the rest of the country with the 2.5 spectrum is owned locally here cbs cbrs priority licenses are owned locally here in every county we've got a lot of spectrum that could do a lot of good if we wrote a plan that takes maximum advantage of it are we going to keep you know i've talked to the mack mountain people and i don't i don't argue with the concept of neutral host but i don't think we're going to get the carrier's attention one and two sites at a time i think we would have to have aggregated the whole 200 sites or 400 sites and say we can provide this much additional coverage but if we didn't even get to the 76 percent that atn t had offered in their secret plan to the governor uh and experts have said we should be shooting for 95 percent coverage uh and if your in-laws come into town and they're on verizon or you're on verizon they're on atn t y'all aren't connecting you know so in in the dead zones so any state money at all should not go into single carrier solutions because it doesn't help uh and think about it from the public safety point of view let's assume all three major carriers had priority and preemption turned on for all eligible but the in a mutual aid vermon is mostly volunteers 5 000 volunteers they come from far away areas if they come from an area served by atn t and they're coming to an area served by verizon their devices aren't going to work right without priority preemption roaming so the it's just the safety imperative itself and the uh increased coverage and the resiliency of failover for first net and or for verizon public safety i forget what they call their public safety offering that brand name should have been in here too i forget i don't give me that talking about it a few weeks ago yeah and i don't know what team opal's offering is either but my point is that there's an opportunity to do this right and the plan is the place to flesh that out not with not by trying to undermine our competition statutes and not by trying to you know set up the department as a grantmaker let's you know teach y'all to write a plan first before we have you hand it out grants the telecommunication the connectivity advisory board hasn't met in years but back when they did they gave 16 000 per address to comcast to build some addresses in norwich one of the wealthiest towns in the state so we there's a reference to all the wi-fi that was put up during the first year of the covid pandemic and nobody checked or logged the backhaul capacity that was speeding those i mean it was a lot of squandered money and with it you know nobody checked the battery backup nobody checked the longevity nobody put a contract under how long and they were charged annual maintenance fee equipment was picked that required a renewing an annual license for the software to use the wi-fi access point talk about encouraging people to turn it off you know it was almost as big as fiasco is giving away all the coverage co sells for a dollar or a hundred dollars or whatever it was the cabinets were one cabinet was worth that for our future small cell endeavors i know you don't need to know what you expect we have a couple minutes left we can wrap up if there's no more comments from anyone on the phone i would like to thank our two interpreters appreciate it and thank rizzi for being on the phone we're on the meeting with us we will do this again wednesday night same place same time five p.m. here and with that everybody have a good night thank you