 So I'm going to call the meeting to order. This is the Senate Finance Committee, and today is January 15th, and we're going to go today, continuing what we've been doing most of the week, which is just doing a review of what we did before we left at the end of September, what's happened since then, and then we can start talking about where we're going from here. Commissioner Tierney is with us and Clay Purvis. Commissioner, are you there? Can you hear me, Madam Chair? I can hear you, yes. For reasons I can't seem to explain, I'm not visible. I think what I might do is leave and come back in. Okay. There's something peculiar going on, so just give me 30 seconds here. Technology is good until it isn't. We'll see, see we can get the commissioner in. I've also asked Randy, Senator Brock to fill us in on what's been going on in the Joint IT Oversight Committee because I know they've been working on things and there's been some activity there, so I thought we'd get a picture as to where we are at this point. Now we see somebody's coming in, yeah, the commissioner is coming in. My screen says she's connecting to audio. So Madam Chair, I'm back with audio. Yeah. But evidently, I am not able to. Your video is on? My video is on. There's something strange going on with my computer, I think. Commissioner, do you have one of those little slide blockers that might be blocking the video on your, on your computer? Senator Hardy, I'm checking right now, but I don't see one. And no, it's a suggestion. This is the first time I've had trouble with this laptop that lost audio a while ago, too. Madam Chair, I'm afraid we'll have to proceed with no camera view of me. We will proceed with just your voice. I'm sorry about that. No, it's happened to many of us. I was just saying I had to get another computer because mine didn't have enough internal memory and I would lose audio or I couldn't get audio or video at first and would regularly phase out. Well, arguably you'll enjoy my presence more without seeing me. OK, well, maybe we got some papers to put up and share, and then nobody will see anybody. There you go. We have plenty of those. I know. OK, yes, they're under Clay's name, but I have a feeling you're going to refer to some of them. Exactly. So the invitation so that you were looking for an update on broadband and Vermont and on the CARES Act monies and how they've been spent. So those are the materials that we've prepared. And Clay, I think it would be good for us to get going on that, especially given the time. I might add to that I didn't have a chance to say hello to Senator Bray and Senator Hardy the last time. So it's the first time I'm seeing you here in the committee and I look forward to working with you and the other members. It's of course good to see all of you again as well. And I look forward to having a productive session with you. Clay, why don't we get started with our materials? Sure. So Clay Purvis with the Department of Public Service. I came prepared today just to give you a broad overview of where we are with broadband deployment in Vermont. Faith, I want to attempt to share my screen. We also have the. The documents that you've submitted on on computer, if there's any difficulty sharing it. Yes, that would be good. Hopefully it works. Does everyone see a map? It hasn't come up yet, Clay. It just says you're screen sharing. OK. I'm in desperate need of better broadband in my house. What's good, we're not showing any favoritism here. That's certainly not. All right. OK. Now we've gone from there. I think that's what happened first. Yeah. OK. I'm going to start with kind of what happened in in in 2020. When the pandemic hit, the legislature passed H 966. And that in created a few programs and funded our connectivity initiative. And in addition to that, the federal government through the FCC made an announcement of awards for the World Digital Opportunity Fund. So at the beginning of 2020, we had roughly 70,000 locations that lacked broadband of 25, 3 or better, according to our mapping. We map broadband by collecting data from Internet Service providers on a location by location basis. Where do you have broadband and at what speed? We map for one. So anyone who has less than four one, we consider nothing. Um, four one to twenty five three, we put in the four one bucket that is woefully underserved. And then anything that is better than twenty five three, but not fiber to the premises, we put in the twenty five three bucket. The federal government's definition of broadband is twenty five three. So the government considers anyone unserved at twenty five three megabits per second to be unserved. Which government can you raise that map up a little bit? Because we've got the colors. But we don't. Yes, I'm sorry. Yes, so we don't have the grid that tells us what the colors mean. There's the legend. So this map melds both the connectivity initiative and the Vermont initiatives that we did this year and what was awarded under RDOF. And so I'll show you the RDOF map in a minute. But we've gone from seven about seventy thousand locations to just over forty six thousand locations that do not have a funded solution for twenty five three. So these two programs are DOF and what Vermont did has knocked off about thirty three percent of the of the locations that lacked twenty five three at the start of two thousand twenty. OK, when you say locations, do you count where the providers tell you they run wire past the property or is that actual homes that have attached to the wire? I'm going to say wire for lack of. But is that actual houses that are hooked up to broadband or just where broadband is available for them to hook up? That would be a serviceable location. So there's a couple of different ways that we can address depending on the technology. I think where people get concerned is with cable video providers. We count any address that's within four hundred feet of the cable video plant as served because if you're within four hundred feet, typically the drop that is the line that goes from the curb where your driveway meets the road up to the house. That's usually doesn't cost anything or rather the cost of that drop is borne by the provider. And then when you're anywhere beyond four hundred feet away from the line, there's going to be some expense that you're going to share to get that drop. So for our mapping, we've looked at all the locations in Vermont and any location that's within four hundred feet of the cable video plant, we've considered served. OK, so it's served, but not necessarily hooked up. If I live next door to that served house, but my driveway is a mile long, then you would not count me as served. We would not count you as served, but OK, you know, we're using the locations as they're mapped and geocoded in the 911 database. So assuming that that's accurate, then that that's where they are in relation to the cable video. The line extension consumer assistance program this year, we did a lot of drops and helped people that had that mile long driveway. They, you know, they didn't have service. They couldn't afford service because the cost of bringing the line up the driveway or because of some special issue like that line had to be put placed in conduit that would really drive up the price of doing that installation was prohibitively expensive. The Lee Kat program did help a lot of people with that particular issue. Rock has a question. It's both sort of a question to comment. And I know we've had some correspondence with the department that the commissioner can can can update you on relative to knowing. We may know where there is access that now is currently available, that we've closed the loop and what we've done. But the real question is how many people, you know, who need Internet connectivity for work, for education or for telemedicine actually have gotten it. And it's that piece that we really don't know at this point in terms of just how well what we've done has worked and actually delivering something that people can afford and can actually use today. Now, I know that the the federal program and perhaps the commissioner will be discussing that. I'm not sure today in terms of what's in the new federal stimulus funds, which I understand includes some funding to be able to provide access to people who cannot currently afford Internet. How that will impact us here and what that will mean. Clay, I'll speak to a couple of things. I do not have more information at this point about what's going to be available federally than you do, Senator. These are things that are getting pushed out now. The one thing I do know is that the subsidy piece is going to go through the FCC and we're slated to file comments on how they ought to structure their program for dispersing that funding, which which, as I understand it, they're going to have dealt with by the end of February. So that is going to be an open question mark for a while. But that said, you're absolutely right. There are new funds available for affordability. I believe for folks in certain income brackets, if I'm not mistaken, perhaps Clay knows the second piece. I want to just draw a line under what you just said, because I think that's a very important composite of policy elements that we have worked on in different ways, but that we've not today drawn together. How much have we spent to get help to whom who has actually gotten it? What is it they're getting? What is the quality of what they're getting? And ultimately, I think, too, was it worth it? And I can agree that that that is a very distilled and and good way to look at public policy. It is not to date how we have been approaching these programs but something well worth looking into to date, especially with the CRF money. What we've been doing is trying to deal with the emergency, which was to get some service available to people in areas where we know they are who can meet one of those three criteria under the Treasury guidelines. The process of verifying what it is that our contracts are delivering is underway, but the ultimate question that you're asking, whether people have taken that service and whether it is working for them and whether it is affordable or not, those are worthy things to be looking at, but they are not where we are focused right now. Well, the concern, obviously, I think that we all have is if we award a contract to a particular vendor and it costs, let's say, nine thousand dollars of address to get it out to that particular home. And if there are 100 homes in that area that are covered and if only 10 of them get internet, it's not nine thousand dollars per serve resident. It's ninety thousand dollars each is what it's actually costing. I said, we don't know what that is right now. And that's something I think it's really important for us to understand. Madam Chair, Senator Brock's question says, talked about getting it out to people. And do you just send Senator Brock? Are you saying extending the trunk line out to get to people or hooking them up to stuff that goes by the house? Well, I'm thinking of just getting stuff that goes by the house by large. But when we are talking about lighting, the light extension program, we're talking about all of these programs. I'm worried when we when we mix and match in our conversations that we don't say which of those two we're we're describing. That's well, I think it's a bit. I think it's a bit of both because the whole idea of what it costs us to deliver service, we're basing it on the number of households, quote, served on, quote, but we have a definition for that. That's pretty loose. And right now we're not being able to measure how effective what we're doing and what we're expending, how effective that actually is in the real world. The real world is people being connected and being able to use those services. So I think what we're doing is we. Right now we're talking about what we did in an emergency where we had people who needed those lines and people and kids who need to go to school. And we didn't. Pay that much attention since it was federal money coming into what it was going to cost us or what it now we're saying. OK, so what did it cost us per household that's actually hooked up? And I think that's where we need to go going forward per household, per household to hook up to what is currently nearby their homes. Is that what we're talking about? I think that's what Sandra Brock is talking about now. Not what we're talking about. What we're doing in order to get connectivity to people and areas and homes that are currently not served. But the the disc them here, the discussion of people who are unserved. Is can be divided into two groups. Those are unserved because it isn't available. Four hundred feet or six hundred feet away and those that aren't served because it doesn't even come into their neighborhood. And if we're going to ask questions about what we've done. Can we have that question clear and the answers to one of those categories? And then we'll take the other category. I think that's part of the problem with the map. It tells us a color. And it tells us a town, but it doesn't tell me if there's a corner of the town that's unserved or is it, you know, and is that corner of the town, the one that's hanging off of 50 foot cliff or five hundred foot, you know, I think we now are going to be getting into that. I hope that little detail. That's a different question. That's a question of where. Well, it's it's is there a neighborhood that's unserved. All we have now is town data. So Senator Brock was asking, what does it cost to hook people up? To something that's going by their homes and the map doesn't address that. So what's the answer to the? Can we answer Senator Brock's question? So what we're able to do is to tell you. Based on the based on the the grants that were given out, there are a certain number of addresses that the grant recipient was representing. They would be providing service, meaning making it available. So we're able to get you that data. I don't think we have it here right now, but we can get you that. If I was able to tell you which of those addresses actually took service, there are two reasons for that. One, it's early for that. And secondly, we don't typically collect that data, but we can have the conversation about whether that is something we should do here with this grant program, particularly since it goes to Senator Brock's point about what exactly did it cost to get the individuals who did wind up getting hooked up, hooked up. The other thing that we can do is we can show you the map with the line extension program, Senator McDonald, which is different from the connectivity initiative program. In the line extension program, the answer is more specific because by definition, somebody who's getting a line extension is getting hooked up. And if memory serves, there's something like 236 folks who were hooked up. And in that program, we would have spent up to three hundred thousand dollars as a subsidy for every one of those people, but not every one of them got a three hundred, a 30, excuse me, a three thousand dollars. So those are two different sets of of connections, if you will, that go to your point, Senator Brock, Senator McDonald. We do have a map that we can put up that shows you where those line extensions were sprinkled throughout the state. And we have the map on that is up right now that tells you where the connectivity initiative projects were built. But I don't think that map, Clay, will tell Senator Brock or Senator McDonald, who within those color blocks actually took service? Or am I wrong about that? No, that is correct. So for the connectivity initiative, we don't know who has taken service or who plans to take service. The address is serviceable, and if they want service, it's available to them. And I think it's important to underscore that state policy to date has been about making service available. State policy to date has not been about actually guaranteeing people service or actually doing the thing that hooks them up. And within that conversation, there definitely is a debate to be had about affordability for those people who can afford to complete their own connection. That it's on them, we've made the service available for people who can't afford to complete their connection. That's a different conversation. And that is one of the things that I think came into focus with the emergency telecom plan that you're going to be getting a briefing on shortly to date. State policy and federal policy have focused on making service available and then providing subsidy for the service as a subscription once the infrastructure exists to make it available to people. But what's missing in between in some cases, and this is the gist, I think, of Senator Brock's questions to me, what's been missing in the middle piece is what happens when service is available, but a certain gear type like, say, an antenna is needed in order to complete the connection and how affordable is that? And then lastly, I would just like to point out the difference between assessing the cost of providing service through the connectivity initiative bids and then assessing the cost of actual connections made once that service was made available. Those are two different cost standards. And what I hear in your question, Senator Brock, you are at this point very interested to connect the people who got connected through these programs. So yes, I'm interested ultimately in the fundamental question of are we doing anything that makes sense? Are we doing anything that's workable? And I take this from a couple of real life examples. Franklin Telephone is a classic example. That's a small telephone company. In fact, it was one of the awardees, I think one of the two awardees of all of those that actually got done with the CARES money, what they were supposed to get done within the time frame that was originally established. The rest did not, for one reason or another. What Franklin has found, though, is that they have various tiers of internet service available and they're finding that people are choosing overwhelmingly the very lowest level of service that does not meet what we've established as a statewide standard. And so it's available, but nobody's buying it. And that a distinct effect on the cost model that carriers, including our CUDs, if the same thing holds true, will have to support. And I think we need to think through that. The second thing is if the commissioner is going to be dealing with the FCC in terms of what they're going to do relative to subsidy, I think we need to be thinking long term about that. Because again, we have this pattern with the federal government that they will come along with largesse that last a year or two in which they will give money to do certain things such as subsidizing internet connectivity. And then after a period of time, they walk away leaving the state trying to figure out how we're going to pay for it on a long term basis. And I think we need to think about how we're going to pay for it on a long term basis before we ask the federal government to do something to, quote, help us, unquote. But I think right now I'd like to get through where we how we spent the money we put out in August, September, what we got for it. If find out what kind of data we need to do the kind of analysis going forward, where hopefully we're going to have a little more time to think things through when we're not in an emergency mode with people driving down to the local drug store to hook up to a hotspot to do their their work. And we can talk about the level because we have a lot of things. It's like the the health care plans are people choosing the lower level of service because that's all they want, which for maybe some 20 year olds is what they want. Or is it because that's all they can afford? And if they could afford more, they'd take the higher level. And those are all we don't know. And those are things that we're going to need to know especially when we start. Putting our money into this. But again, yeah, if we string out fiber to everybody's health and nobody can afford to hook up to it, then then have we achieved anything? So, Madam Chair, we're we we're asking a long questions that usually involve three or four different subsets and definitions. And I think we've been told we know how many customers live within. Four hundred feet of the whatever that wire is go through. Yes. And and we're not sure how many have been hooked up. And when we know that, we'll know how what it costs to hook each one up. And so one of our challenges is to set some policy or spending money to hook people up to what's going by. And we we'd like to know what the costs were and what it might be. What we haven't, we still don't know, is what is actually going down the road by their house that they're hooking up to. And Clay has referred to 20 to 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25 because I don't believe, I believe when it came to getting internet service out, we preferred fiber, but we went as far as saying it was, originally we had a veto for the CUDs. We were interested in protecting the CUD's financial viability to string out fiber in the future and not allow the flat areas, whatever to be cherry pick, but I don't think we mandated, I know we didn't mandate fiber and I don't think we mandated anything above 25-3. That is correct, Madam Chair. And the data that I gave you in response to the question that was posed to me on Tuesday, this is the chart that has the blue and green lines in it. You can see that only two projects were awarded that were cable and both of those were 25-3s, but beyond that, with this CRF money, the rest were either fiber or fixed wireless, but you were technology agnostic for purposes of the emergency. That's what I thought. Does Senator Bray, do you have the language of the discretion that was authorized to the Commissioner and Department of Public Service? Yes. Senator Bray, do you also have a question? I have, they've been sort of accumulating in the last half hour. Okay. But the answer to respond to Senator McDonald, the, so I'm looking at Act 137 from 2020. I'm on page 31, sub G, which begins at the bottom of the page and it's quite short. So I could just, I think read it to everyone. Any new services funded in whole or in part by monies from this program shall be capable of speeds of at least 25 megabits per second download and three megabits per second upload. However, when the technology is feasible, priority shall be given to services that are capable of 100 megabits per second symmetrical service. And I think, you know, when I reread that as part of preparing for this discussion, I don't know what that means when we say feasible. If you have enough money, anything is feasible. So I don't know how the decisions are made about what technology to build out. But anyway, so that's the language of 137. I would suggest that if we allow the commissioner, the department to go through their presentation, we would have more information on which to base our questions. I think we're getting our questions ahead of the information. And I think we also know that some people have very strong opinions in this field and probably know more than the rest of us. So that would be my suggestion, Senator Bray. Well, so can I go back to your point, Madam Chair? I have a beginner's question and that would be helpful to me at least maybe to others, I don't know. The commissioner was saying half an hour ago, you know, if something was eligible for CARES money, according to the three criteria, and I was just wondering if you could review for us what those triggers were that made a location eligible. Yes, under the treasury guidelines that accompanied the CARES Act money, if you had a student who needed to do remote learning or if you had telehealth needs or if you had remote work needs, those were the three criteria or the analysis was that we could use the money for this purpose or purposes of broadband construction. Great, thank you very much. That essentially says we can't run it through a vacation town where no one's living there or working there most of the time, but it's pretty broad for someone. Yes, what you're getting at, Madam Chair, is that if you have say a student on a road and there are 20 houses on the road and you have to pass 19 to get to that student, that's incidental. And that's fine in those 19 homes now have new availability they didn't have before. But what the CARES Act required was that the objective be serving or making service available to that student. The other issue we faced is we couldn't find out about telehealth health because of HIPAA requirements. Doctors couldn't tell us, I've got five patients on that road leading up to the student. So everybody needs telehealth. So we've worked, we're sliding off again into the case that was just given to us about 17 houses down a roadway in order to connect one student farther down that roadway. Does that involve sending connections all the way down the road and then up the student's driveway? Is that what we're having described? What I was meant to describe, Senator Brock McDonald was either a connectivity initiative project where say a fiber line was strung down the road and I think would end with that 20th house where the student was. And if the other 19 homes wanted to hook up to that, that's their choice. Or in the line extension case, assuming that the distance qualified as a line extension, it would be the same thing, that line's getting extended, but it's to that particular home. I think if the line is, the drop to the home doesn't pass other homes, but there would be a line that has to purvey the service and if it passes those other homes they could hook up to. Does that answer your question? Well, it sort of does, but the difficulty in this discussion is when we're talking about going down roads in order to send things off to people. The term we use for that is line extension. Depending on the length of the line, it's either a line extension or it's part of a connectivity system project that extends the system. And I sympathize with the difficulty you're having. I have that same difficulty. Where does a line extension project end and a connectivity initiative project begin? We've had some cases in the line extension program, for instance, where you have small pockets of the neighborhood where eight houses are getting connected and those are all technically line extensions. Another person might look at that and say, that's a very small connectivity initiative project. But still in the gross sense of both terms, if you are in your house and you're not connected to, say, Comcast and you want that connection and you're outside of 300 feet, you do not qualify for what's called a service drop. If you're at 500 feet, we'll say that's a line extension. If you live in that town and Comcast is in the next town over and you're wanting to get Comcast service in your town, it would probably take a connectivity initiative project for that town, for that service to go from the town that's neighboring to your town to bring you Comcast service. Senator McDonnell, I don't think you're getting the answer that you want. I'm not done, Chair, and we keep using words that don't seem to mean the same thing when there's the, there are the lines that go by people's houses and through people's neighborhoods and then stop somewhere. When they're built, let's assume no one is connected to those lines. What's the vocabulary word for those lines? Okay. What is it? Yeah, no, I'm thinking about your question. Can you talk about new lines that we have extended in the line? I mean, there's a different, I think what I heard the commissioner say is, we couldn't use this carousel money. I was asking what we use. I'm just asking when we get permission to use it, what is the thing called that we're using it on? Well, I am not sure that you are setting up a realistic description. You could not, no private provider would extend a line through a neighborhood that nobody is going to connect to. So that cost- What would the name be for such a line? Would that be a neighborhood? Bad business. Senator, can I finish? Can you hook up one? Okay, in order to do a CRF or CARES or whatever, COVID line, the regulation said it had to be being hooked up to somebody that was working, that needed it to work from home or a student or telehealth. So we might've run that line if there was a student up there. We might've run- What's that line called? Okay, well, I think what I heard the commissioner say is it gets fuzzy. We're damn right, it's fuzzy. Okay, and you can't live with fuzzy and I'm sorry, but it gets fuzzy. Well, I know I'm driving people crazy now, but we use expressions like interstate highways. We use expressions like black tops. We use expressions like gravel roads and we use expressions like driveways. We need to have corresponding names so we know what the heck we're talking about. If it connects you down your driveway to what's the end of the driveway, what's that called, a home connection? No, that's called a service drop if it's within 300 feet. If it's within 300 feet. Senator, you're not hearing the end of the sentence. It's a service drop if it's within 300 feet. Okay. If it's beyond that. And the service drop connects to. The house to a line. No, on the other end. I'm sorry, Senator, I'm not understanding the question. On one end is the house. You go down the driveway and you connect it to. To a line. Well, they're all lines. What's the name for this line? If it's beyond 300 feet, you're extending that line to the house. That's a line extension. The cable plant on the street in the public right of way. Like, can you help here? It's called what? I think June did say it's the cable lines. The cable plant line is the line that the cable company is responsible for. Okay. And if it's a copper line that does to forms the same function only less robustly, what's that thing called? The copper line. That is called in the telephone parlance. That is a loop. Madam chair. But it is a line. Yeah, I'm going to suggest that we are going to drop the sender McDonald. I'm going to send you for a tutorial. And see, because I'm not sure that the rest of us are struggling to be as precise as you are. And perhaps you can help us. Madam chair, I'm gonna, I will stop. But each time we devote money to something, it goes to different categories of lines. Okay. And I'd like to be able to discuss one category at a time. So how they, the regulations for each category, as we understand them. So I will mute myself. Let's move forward. And maybe if we get the presentation, we can figure out what we don't understand. Madam chair, I do understand the center's frustration. And I've got an employee who stares out his window every day at a coil of EC fiber. The drop is coiled up at the telephone pole at the end of his driveway waiting to be hooked up. So it is a frustrating problem. When we talk about the line extension consumer assistance program, that program got people hooked up. So that ran the line up to the house. Out to the house, into the house. They, they had to agree to take service. So they're buying service. That program was consumer driven in that consumers apply to us for the subsidy. And we coordinated with the cable company or EC fiber to get that, that line extended and the drop up to the house made. And we had money in there for fiber drops, right? You did as well. They're more expensive. You had to put them underground and yeah. Yes, and we did. So with the line extension program, we did about 260 line extensions. So people actually got it to their house with the get Vermonters connected now. EC fiber, Mansfield community fiber, together did about 322 locations where they had a very line in conduit. Those were the difficult to reach areas. Notably, EC fiber did mobile home parks. So most of the mobile home parks ran off Chelsea area. So that was a good program. That was a subset though of the connectivity initiative. And I did want to go back and The activity initiative was really, the wire was there, but we needed to get people hooked on to whatever was going by on the street or in my case, it goes through the backyards. The connectivity initiative was more about actually bringing the wire into the neighborhood. So the neighborhood was on the street. So it was the more macro program, whereas the Lee cap and the get Vermonters connected was the more micro problem solving for individual locations. So I did the extension. I have, I had several neighborhoods talk to me about being a half mile from the line. And oh, by the way, I've got three neighbor, you know, and they tell me it's gonna, the number 20,000 struck in my head to get it run to my house, but I got three neighbors. And I think they talked to the commissioner a long time ago, but if all three houses could request the $3,000 initiative, they came pretty close to getting the cost of the line extension up that road. Is that? That was the line extension consumer assistance program. And we did have many neighborhoods take advantage of that together. Air Swamp Road, I think was- Yeah, that might have been the U32 teacher and he's not appealing her. I believe we got her house connected under that program. But I'll go back and double check to make sure that project was done. But- I know I had a couple, but then there was one where there wasn't anything in town at all. So that wouldn't be an extension. That would be a connectivity because you were getting something into town. Yes, that's- Or into a whole section of, is that- That's where the connectivity initiative, I think plays a more useful role because there's nothing to extend in that town. So there's no line extension to be had, but if you could do a larger project where a SEALAC or a telephone company could come in and do a larger few hundred home bill and get started there, then you have something to extend. And so this chart that I have up, I hope you can see it. I think we're missing the top of it. Yes, let me scroll up a little. I start with VTEL, but I can see that there's at least one line above that. There you go. So to answer Senator Bray's initial question on the technology breakdown, as he pointed out, the legislation did allow us to fund anything that was 25, three or better, but to favor fiber. And so you can see here in the chart, we spent about $8 million on fiber to the home. So that's the best broadband you can get. And we did about 2,175 locations for that 8 million cable TV, which we put into the 25 three bucket, but it's capable of at least 100 megabit download. It can't do the upload at 100, but it can do the download. We did 194 locations. And then for about $4 million, we did 7,000 locations of wireless. So as you can see, we favored fiber in the sense that we've spent the majority of the money on fiber, but fixed wireless did have a greater reach, significantly less expensive to do more location. And so here's the breakdown by company. STTP is fiber to the premises. Yes. Yes, fiber to the premises. So that's a lot of companies ranging from small telephone companies like Franklin Telephone to EC Fiber and Tilson to larger companies. That is the breakdown per type of what we spent and the type of the technology that it bought, either fiber to the premises, the wireless. I've only seen two cables. That's correct. We did very little cable under the connectivity initiative. Most of our cable build was through Lee Cap through the line extension program. So we did 200 locations through the connectivity initiative. We did well over 200 locations with cable through Lee Cap. So in total, we did just over 400 locations with cable. And so we did do a significant amount of cable. And as I remember the discussion, you're gonna wait for two years for cable when your kids need to go to school now, or if the advantage with fixed wireless is that if and when the CUDs were primary focus, they were able to get fiber up the road to the premises that the fixed wireless was relatively easy to take down unlike stringing cable, which got up there. And that's my recollection of the discussion. Senator Bray, I think you're right. Yeah, quick question. What's the, can you say a little more about fixed wireless as a technology and what kind of speeds you get, whether it's symmetrical, stuff like that? Sure. The fixed wireless uses a variety of different wireless technologies and spectrum depends on the company. Most of these companies are using the CBRS spectrum, which is the citizens broadband radio spectrum, a radio service, excuse me. It's a new spectrum that the FCC made available, I think last year that is really increasing the reach and the throughput for fixed wireless. We've required wireless companies to do speed testing at each location out of the fear that they wouldn't be able to actually serve each address that they promised to serve with 25 threes, I'm not alleging malfeasance by wireless companies. It's just the way wireless is propagated, it's less than definitive as to whether they're actually gonna be able to produce service once the tower's up and running, whereas with a wire line expansion, you know what you're gonna get. You know that the fiber connection is going to deliver the speeds that the fiber provider is selling you. So fixed wireless, we are taking a bit of a risk in the sense that they might not be able to reproduce the speeds that they've promised. So we've required them to prove to us on a location by location basis that they've actually can deliver the speed that they've promised at that location. Okay, and just complete the story and what speeds are we talking about with that technology? At least 25 threes. So if they can't do 25 threes, they're not gonna get paid for that address. Thank you. What does it can't do 25 free mean? Senator McDonald, I'm watching the time, okay? And we are getting into our next guess. So I wanna let the commissioner and Clay finish their presentation and then we will set up another day with more time. But I think for your level of definition, you might wanna talk to them. And I can set that up and the three or four of us can sit down, all right? I'm happy to do that. I know that Matt Dunn and Joanne Hove is about to come on, I don't wanna take that away from you because they have a good presentation. Yeah, I think I'd like to let you finish, Jess, what did we buy with the $30 million we put out last year? Okay, I hope you can see that. I stopped sharing my screen for a second. I just wanted to share the connectivity map. If you hadn't seen it, I'm not sure if the screen actually cut over to share. I am not, yeah, okay. Here we go. So you asked us to produce an interactive map that showed the locations where we provided service. The legend is on the right. My legend's covered by the video, but... Okay, yeah, we did see that map before, okay. Okay, yeah, so you can take a look at this and this will tell you which company's providing service to which locations based on the grant. And this is in the connectivity problem. That is purely the connectivity initiative, so that is what we... Bring in the wire up the right of way. Yeah, that's right. Then, sorry, getting a little off track. And your product has a question. Just a very quick question. I don't wanna dwell on it, but I notice in this list, there are 18 different projects that are cited. And then when we look at when those projects were completed, half of them weren't completed by December the 30th. Now, some of them I gather had indicated they had supply chain difficulties, but in delving into that, they were simply saying not it was a supply chain problem, but they didn't have the labor. So I'm wondering, did a number of these companies make bids for things that they couldn't possibly deliver on time? I think that's a good and important question. The amount of work that I think was being done in Vermont at once was pretty incredible. A lot of these companies are relying on contractors. And I think as we've talked about in this committee in the past, contract labor for this kind of work in Vermont is scarce. We've talked with Vermont Technical College about a workforce development program that they could perhaps do to help alleviate some of the constraints. But by and large, I don't think that Vermont's labor market was set up to handle the influx of the work being done. The amount of make ready that needed to be done was pretty significant. Telecom equipment that needed to be purchased in a lot of cases ended up being on back order. So whether that's radios or actual cable, a storm in December had drawn many line workers out of this state into neighboring states such as Massachusetts to handle storm recovery. So those kinds of things happen when you're doing broadband expansion, the timeline was really aggressive here. I mean, we've got this program started in July and they started working the fall on a lot of these projects. But things happen, storms, make ready delays, supply chain delays. I think it's a blessing that the CARES Act was extended by a year because companies were really struggling to meet the... That problem is, and my question really is, are we depending upon vendors who make promises that they can't deliver on? And should they not have known that they didn't have the labor or couldn't get the labor to do what it is that they promised and contracted with us to do and had the federal government not come along and given them a pass with the pension, we'd be in real trouble. The stuff wouldn't get done and they wouldn't get paid. So it's just an observation for us to be very, very careful about looking to hold bidders responsible for delivering what they promised to deliver on time and on budget. It's an observation. It's a good point. And certainly with the LEACAP program, we had to tell a lot of applicants, we're sorry, we can't do your project because it can't be done by 1230. So there was a significant amount of that happening. And indeed, of those that we considered completed, in many cases, they still haven't been able to produce the final documents and the final testing, which was also supposed to have been done by then. Only two of these people get this entire project done within the timeframe that was promised. Two, Franco Telephone being one. Okay, maybe they could give classes. I think that is a cautionary we're gonna continue this discussion as we move forward because I think we're all hopeful, if not expecting that there will be more broadband money coming in. And when we let the next section, that's I think when we should have the time to make sure that we don't repeat any mistakes that we made getting this out the door when unless we got them hooked up, kids couldn't go to school and people couldn't go to work. So I think I look forward to continuing this discussion. May I ask one other thing? Because I know that the commissioner's time with us today is short, but there's one fairly important piece and that's the 10 year telecommunications plan that I'd hope they'd be able to address a bit today. And I noticed that in the plan and what's been put out, there's $250,000 that's been allocated. And to the best of my knowledge, I'm told that they've not requested any more funds from the administration. And the question is, is that sufficient to do a telecommunications plan of the level and quality that we really expect and to get it done by, what's it June 30th? Is that realistic? Senator Brock, we've had this conversation in this committee many times before. And the last time I recall having this in September, I had said to you that $250,000 is what was appropriated and that's what's available to us and that's what we're going to use. And that is what we're doing right now. And we met yesterday with the team, interagency team to select a vendor. And I believe if we haven't already announced the selection, we will be shortly. And that contract will be funded with the appropriation made. What you're asking me specifically is, have I asked for more money for this planning endeavor? No, I have not. And do you believe that it can be done to the quality? And we've discussed that many times in this committee that we're expecting for that amount of money. And which is still in total, even when we consider the emergency broadband plan, still considerably less than the bids and proposals that you got the last time you went out for a competitive request for proposals. Clay, have we already announced the contractor that we chose or not? We haven't announced it to the world. In that case, Senator, I'm afraid, I'm not afraid to discuss this any further except to say that we're going to do the work we can with the money that we have. And I think that's gonna be a quality product. I really don't know whether it's going to meet your expectations. We'll have to see what the product is and what you think of it at that time. Senator Cummings, I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I think you're talking. Okay, I'll move back. Let it all. No, we will definitely be continuing this. If it does look like you're going to need more money, if we get more federal money for more broadband planning, I know it's gonna be hard to get anything out of the general fund, but make sure that you just don't say no, let us know, and especially if we can come up with one time money, that might be something we could find. Absolutely, I think also for the benefit of the newer committee members, we've also had a substantial amount of planning that's been done over the last year by the CUDs, for instance, using CARES Act money and also by the contractors who you're about to hear a presentation from for the emergency plan. So it's the 10 year telecom plan is not starting from scratch. It's going to have available to it the product that has already been paid for through the CRF money that's been dispersed for that. So I think those are good signs, good things that can help produce a robust 10 year telecom plan, but like you, I'm very mindful it's gonna be hard to get anything out of the general fund. And I think that's a really good segue into our next, and Senator Bray, you have a question. Yeah, it's a very short one. I don't know all the vendors. I know there's a project out Danville or West Danville. What vendor should I look for on the maps in order to be able to identify that one? West Danville is Tilson. Tilson, yeah. It's fine. Thank you. And I would urge any one of you to feel free to give us a call and we're happy to discuss some of these details offline. If that will help you as you acclimate to the committee. I would like to move into the next presentation, which is the emergency broadband plan. And Matt Dunn and Joanne Hobus are both here, but when we had hoped to be able to use CARES money to help do our 10 year plan and we're told, nope, but we could do an emergency plan. And when we did that, our hope was that we might learn things that we could use or that would inform the 10 year plan. And so we'll find out. So I'm going to turn that over, Matt. I guess I've got you on my agenda. But the floor is yours, so thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. And delighted to be here on a Friday afternoon to chat about one of my favorite subjects. I am joined by Joanne Hobus, who is the president and CEO of CTC Technologies and Energy based in Maryland, who, and it was a collaborative project to be able to bring this emergency telecom plan to you this fall. And the plan is to walk you through the slide deck that I believe was already distributed to the committee or posted. It is under our documents. Yep. I'm still getting used to, you know, Senate committee meetings via Zoom. So. Zoom, yes. But it should be available to you. We also created a summary document of the final plan, which was a very large document. I think getting to the pertinent points as well as the legal review, which we thought would be helpful as you're evaluating a variety of different possible scenarios moving forward. And also some of the details of a telephone poll that we did to supplement an online poll, which wasn't in the draft plan because it hadn't been completed by the draft plan, but is also available for you to review. And that was a poll specifically of individuals who had been identified as being underserved, along the way. So if there aren't any other sort of preliminary questions, I'm happy to jump into a prezo presentation to walk through the basic findings. I am not seeing any questions at this point. Right. Excellent. All right. Let me see if I am powered to share. And can everyone see my screen okay? I think so, I can. Okay. Just on a technical basis, I have the video of you all over here on the left. I'm gonna be looking at the presentation so that I'm presenting to you. So please speak up if you want me to stop and along the way. Just- I have everybody blanked out. I'm trying to see if I can get you up on my other screen, but I can't see you either. So either raise your hand or holler. Okay. I've never known this committee, Madam Chair, to be shy. So- No, that is not one of their issues. Great. So where I wanna start is with what the task was that was given to us. And I'm sure you referenced that this was a very specific on a very short timeline project to be able to look at the short-term immediate strategies for dealing with the lack of connectivity during the pandemic. We had a number of back and forths after the RFP was let. And once it was awarded to make sure we understood that. And what we did is we also framed this project with three specific goals in mind. One was, again, to a target the immediate COVID-19 needs. The second was to not adversely impact the long-term goal of 100 over 100 speed broadband, which the legislature has set as its goal for the entire state. And it should assist in driving towards long-term state goals whenever possible. And given the nature of the request, which is how do we get people online now as quickly as humanly possible? There certainly was an emphasis on that that led to not going into those longer-term pieces, but we did try to build that base of knowledge that you can then refer to as you're making plans for the future. The recommendations assumed financial resources were available to move quickly, as well as staff or contracted resources to do that. So that's baked into this assumption. And the other just really clear thing is that this is not the 10-year telecom plan or a blueprint to bring the state to over 100 goal. And that is a really important note. That is a different project. That is to come, but hopefully, again, this provides some of the groundwork for the state to be able to do that longer-term planning. The work that was done by the two teams that were working together was pretty intensive. Well over 60 stakeholder interviews. We did an online survey that actually had a pretty robust response level across the state. We also did some intensive, we hired a firm to do an intensive phone survey to be able to get responses from folks who were underserved. We felt that people who had poor internet already were probably going to struggle to sometimes respond to an online survey. So we wanna make sure that we got their response as well as how they were coping and what they were seeing as challenges. We did also a specific online business survey working with business organizations across the state to get that out. And then surveys of other types of stakeholders that were both outlined in the RFP, but also we feel are critical to bringing internet to folks during this time or are seeing the impacts of it as they are trying to conduct their public purposes. So the high-level summary is that the big challenge is with residential connectivity, not institutional connectivity. So it's really with the residents, most institutions, not all, but most institutions have figured out ways to be able to get connectivity at some level. That's not including home-based businesses, but larger businesses, libraries, hospitals, they figure that out. It's residents who are still having real challenges. There are three categories that we're gonna talk about, though of folks who are struggling to get connection. One group were those who did not have the infrastructure to be able to get broadband, whether or not they could afford it. There was another group that was not able to get broadband due to their income. And then there were the intersection of the two, and those are different groups. They do have an overlap, but we tried to break them out because we think there are different challenges associated with each of those. There is clearly, and this should be no surprise, a need for connectivity for remote work, remote education, and telehealth. I will say the numbers for telehealth was higher than I would have expected, given the lack of use of telehealth before the pandemic. Those numbers really grew quite quickly. We believe that in the very short term, using temporary cellular data infrastructure, we can get to over 90% connectivity. This is not a long-term solution. People would eventually get frustrated with this, but in the very short term, that you can get to the place where people can do remote work, remote education, and basic telehealth over that type of infrastructure. There does need to be a mobilization of people if you want to implement this quickly. If you want to address people who are in need right now, and that there are a lot of stakeholders, including and perhaps particularly CUDs that have important role to play in making that kind of deployment happen. So this is the universe of people that we zeroed in on. And you can see the intersecting circles here, where you have approximately 61,000 premises without access to 25,000 broadband. You have then, depending on the category of low-income folks, 30,000 to almost 70,000, who we believe are struggling to be able to get that connectivity because of the cost. And then the folks who fit into that intersection of the two, which will take an additional type of strategy to be able to address. So I'm gonna walk through the survey data, the responses that we got, just to give some of the highlights. The full text of the findings from the survey are in the overall project, but this can give you a sense of what's there. And again, I don't think anyone who's been connected, their community are gonna find these as particularly surprising, but teachers are spending a significant amount of time working out at home technical issues, whether they're teaching from home, but more likely the students that are trying to work remotely. And so they're spending a lot of time doing that, many times having to do with the connectivity level, and that's taking away from teaching time in an already challenging environment. There's been some significant absenteeism in some districts. I think there was a recent VPR story about that in some areas, and it's very difficult through an online environment to be able to connect to find out what those challenges are. There are students who are sitting in parking lots and feel the need to go to other students' homes to get access, even though that's not the best recommendation under the COVID guidance, that's what they're having to resort to. And only 19% of those who were in the phone survey who were identified as folks who had had less than 25, three said their home internet was, only 19% said their home internet was adequate for remote learning. And so that's a huge group of folks who are not getting the adequate broadband to be able to do that learning. The other interesting findings are that businesses across the state are transitioning to work and operations online. This is a trend that happened by directive. There is though a sense that a lot of this is going to be permanent in the longer term. The state-run networks are seeing lower traffic as state workers are using their residential providers to be able to do their work on behalf of the state. And workers at home across the state are struggling with connectivity. So there are some other specifics that I mentioned before about telehealth that I think is really important to note. The respondents who said they used telehealth before the pandemic was very small. The numbers who are using telehealth on a monthly basis, much less than monthly, has grown dramatically. These are things that healthcare providers are having to adjust to. And they're doing their best because they think this is actually really helpful and beneficial in the long term for costs and being able to do good services. But four in 10 people are reported having technical issues when trying to access telehealth. Health professionals themselves, including doctors had trouble actually providing services from home when they were having to quarantine because they were exposed, because their broadband wasn't good enough to be able to do that kind of engagement. And health professionals spent significant amounts of their time helping those patients with those technical challenges rather than zeroing in their valuable and expensive time on the provision of healthcare services. So we also talked to folks about their civic engagements and so many town functions have switched to using online mechanisms to engage their constituencies, much like the legislature is doing through Zoom. And 70% of the town managers that responded to us were reported having difficulty even understanding constituents because of poor service. And since this is the way that people get input on a local level, this is a big deal. In addition, 50% report meeting interruptions from technical issues as they're trying to make it happen. And town managers overwhelmingly rank an adequate internet access as the largest barrier to constituents staying connected. So this is the area that I think we found some really positive things is around state agencies and government systems have stepped up to the challenge and have adopted a well. There are still some areas where there's need of support and some of it is to be able to serve their end customers. RDCs, Regional Development Corporations are spending a lot of time and resources they've received to help their businesses get online and be able to provide their goods and services in an online function. But the demand is outpaced that funding that's available. So they could be doing a lot more to help the businesses be able to have that kind of capacity. Many remote AOT and ANR locations do not have seller internet access, which is a real concern. And departments of libraries feel some fiber connect network equipment is close to failing and hard to replace and since they're now being depended on for their parking lots to be able to provide broadband that's a big deal. And then on the challenges front, a majority of towns, when we did the survey and this was back in November had not even started a plan for virtual town meetings or other kinds of alternatives and don't feel confident they can reach constituents that have connectivity issues. And there are still some high friction in the programs that were provided by the state that were intended to alleviate telecom challenges, which led to low adoption. And that's not for a lack of trying. It was something that they were trying to do everything they could. It was stacked on top of their other responsibilities, but we did find that some of those were not as successful as they had hoped. So these are the kinds of organizations that have stepped up to this challenge in really interesting ways. I'm not gonna read through all these, but libraries have been out there making sure that there's wifi 24 hours a day. Although few of them are doing lending of mobile hotspots, which we thought was interesting since that seems to be a strategy in other states that's been very powerful. PEG TV organizations have been really creative in being able to help give access to content as well as being able to help folks use their broadband services. There was one example of the Catholic priest, I think in the Manchester area, who the PEG station helped out. He wasn't sure how to use Zoom to be able to have services online, but there are lots of other examples like that. The superintendents we talked to are quite stressed as you can imagine, but broadband availability has been a huge challenge even while they have been taking the steps to reorient the curriculum to be able to deliver education to folks who are in-person, who are in-person and remote, and sometimes remote, and all remote. And that's a really tough spectrum to work with, especially when you have connectivity challenges. And then the CUDs have very much stepped up or working hard with almost entirely volunteer boards to be able to advance the work on fiber solutions or longer-term broadband solutions. But they do have a desire to support the low income and understerve community members and are looking for ways to plug in and have participated in some cases. So, we did talk to a lot of different ISPs that are providing services, and there were certainly different kinds of results. The big one is that residential broadband usage is up as much as 30%, which is a huge jump in the amount of utilization. DSL, as you probably know technologically or by engineering, is constrained. There's only so much that can be passed over DSL lines. And so when you're adding lots and lots of people to it, it has an impact. There is a lot of increased demand in installation and upgrades that has resulted in labor shortages and delays due to that. So, there is a workforce development aspect that's going to be important in order to be able to continue the work. Comcast and charter have low-cost programs, although it appears there's pretty low adoption. And we have a, Comcast is the largest cable broadband provider that has one of these programs. And you can see that even for low-income Vermonters that we surveyed, over 50% haven't even heard of the program. And these are folks who should be able to access Comcast internet essentials. And then the internet, the independent networks did set a step up and offer free service to low-income subscribers in certain circumstances. It varies obviously from provider to provider, but they did go ahead and do that in their attempt to help during this time. Despite the adaptation and resilience of these entities and the efforts on the part of ISP providers, there's still approximately 61,000 premises unserved. Low-income Vermonters are disproportionately unable to access broadband. As I mentioned, low adoption for programs intended for low-income support. And there continue to be technology and digital literacy barriers. And these impact the ongoing delivery of services above and beyond just getting used to a new medium. It's just, you spend lots and lots of time just trying to get through those technology problems. And there really isn't an organization or an institution staffed and funded today to be a go-to resource for connectivity issues, right? Peg stations sometimes serve that role. Other places serve that role. Folks sometimes call clay, but that is not a solution to doing that. And so we just wanted to flag that as a challenge in the state. So our three big emergency mitigation strategies are this. One is to provide a new broadband service subsidy to low-income Vermonters during the pandemic who have access to the infrastructure associated with good broadband, but can't afford it. The second is to connect unserved addresses quickly using short-term infrastructure solutions, primarily with 4G mobile hotspots. And in many cases, it'll be necessary to have signal boosters, but with the signal boosters, even if they don't think they can get cell service at the location, they can. And so that's an additional component that could be added. And then the third is to launch a six-month broadband core to go and help with the implementation of this program, whether it's doing the site visit to understand where a hotspot could work and where a single signal booster is needed, even potentially installing the signal boosters. Just, you know, folks out there making this happen, being available for calls to be able to help people with getting these things set up and working. And then eventually to be able to provide additional digital literacy support at the far end, as people are still trying to grapple with how to avail themselves of things like telehealth and other items. So I'm going to go through these quickly, but, you know, happy to take additional questions. There are really good models in other states for providing broadband subsidies to reach low-income families. And these, it usually involves having a third-party aggregate and negotiate bulk purchases at discounted rates of either the equipment associated with mobile hotspots or the actual codes for people to be able to connect to existing infrastructure and then being on the front lines of getting it deployed. Working with social service agencies, school districts and the like to just get it out there. It removes the friction that can get in the way of using either existing programs through Comcast or other or the kind of reimbursement program that the state, you know, attempted to put together to get those folks connected and connected quickly. The second is to invest in the targeted equipment infrastructure to reach, you know, uncertain folks. That's the mobile cellular, you know, data hotspots or devices that can go and... Madam Chair, can I ask a question? I can't hear it. Senator Sirotkin, you can't hear me. No, I can hear you now. Just going back to the other slide and the more global recommendation, is this just to suggest that if you have less than good service, you can't qualify for a subsidy? That if you have less than good... Well, your previous slide said, provide a subsidy to people who have good broadband service. No, what I meant was they have access to the infrastructure. So they're in an area where a Comcast can deliver service if they can afford it. Okay. Comcast? We're not arguing right now. So if they have a weak service and they're having trouble in before, are they going to be excluded from the subsidy program under this proposal or are they going to be forced to switch carriers or how does that work? No, no. So the idea would be to... And the way it's worked in other states is you can both purchase and aggregate and then deploy for any of the major providers that are there now. And that no one would be excluded. When I did the concentric circles, there are some folks that have the infrastructure already in place to be able to get 25, three broadband or better, but it's a cost barrier. And what this would do is to actually facilitate making sure that they're taking advantage of the existing subsidy programs, but doing it through a bulk purchase mechanism. There's the other universe that doesn't have the ability to get Comcast if they... Or another cable provider or EC fiber or whoever else, but they could be served with a mobile hotspot device and potentially with an additional booster to go along with that. And that would be... Also included with that would be data plans so that they could be subsidized as well if they're in that low income category. Okay, thank you. Yep. Joanne, do you have anything to add to that? You've been involved in more of those across the country. Yeah, I would just say, Senator, that the... No, Joanne, excuse me. We need you to just introduce yourself for the record so we know who's talking. My apologies. Good afternoon. I'm Joanne from CTC technology and energy and I had the pleasure of working on this project with Matt and the team at the state. The eligibility for programs like this and our recommendation in the report is that eligibility be based on income level. So it's not based on technology or infrastructure or service, but it recognizes that whether service is available or not, there are a substantial number of Vermonters who can't afford to purchase it in the current moment. And that that is a barrier that needs to be overcome as a tool for addressing the challenges of the pandemic. Any other questions? Are we ready to go on? Okay, let's go on. Great. So one of the things that we did, even during this, you know, short period of putting together this proposal was really dig into the data and using geospatial analysis to estimate what kind of technology could be reached by, or what kind of premise could be reached by what kind of technology. And we used then a reductive process to try to get as close to everyone covered as possible. And we use a lot of different data sets. I do want to say that the state of Vermont actually has better data than any other state in the country as far as I can tell. I mean, it's really, really granular. The team has done a great job. It's much better than what's available, certainly at the federal level. And it allowed us to do that process based on those to the premise level kind of data as we were doing this work. I will flag that when we did the phone survey of the folks who were deemed unserved by that data set that the state put together, we found about a 12% error rate. Where there were about 12% of the folks who we surveyed did have over 25, three or 25, three or over connectivity, which is actually quite good, especially since there was a fair bit of deployment that went on between the time they finished that data set in the spring. And when we did the survey in the latter half of the year, in the spring and when we did the survey in the latter part of November and early December. So that'll give you a sort of a good sense of how the states doing and the level of accuracy with that data set. So this is how we were looking at the path to reaching the unserved premises at the far end of the tail. You'd have to get a little bit more creative and particularly working with, you know, some of the wireless providers that, you know, should be able to get some connectivity with an antenna and signal booster and the like. And there's also a group of premises that could be covered if details reconnect application is successful. I've not heard word whether or not it was, but they had targeted a number of different locations. But this is how we, you know, went from the, you know, 63,000 all the way down to covering just about everyone. As well as the counts for the low income. Individuals or households that would be served. We also found something that went into our recommendations was pockets of unserved folks in Vermont. And these are the places where we are recommending the underwriting and funding of line extensions and don't feel that those would be doing any kind of undue harm to the CUDs because they're completely surrounded by served areas, right? They just happen to be islands. They may have been on the, the border between one Eilec territory and, you know, another provider. But they, they really should be addressed because it's unlikely for a CUD to, to over build through lots of already served, you know, homes and households to be able to include them in an overall project plan. So we've gotten that pretty granular. And there's a group of them. And we've been able to identify those by, by municipality as it's moving forward. And then the final piece is developing a broadband core to provide the technical assistance to be able to deliver on this. We did a, a, a, an estimate of the number of individuals that would be needed to be able to reach this, the many, the number of households that would need to be supported. We broke it out by regional planning committee, region, since that doesn't, since, since they've been on the, on point for CUDs. But as you also know, not all towns are covered by CUDs, but CUDs would, would obviously be the ideal coordinating entity in the places where they, they do exist. And they would do that work for testing to make sure that a proposed solution works on the CUD. Rather than just, you know, sending a child home with a device or, or just mailing it to them, making sure it's actually working, doing the troubleshooting and then providing a technology help desk. They could actually rotate around and be a help desk and be able to solve problems that come up over a period of time. So, you know, our estimate is if you wanted to do this, really quickly, you would, you would need probably, you know, 42 core members. This could be done in collaboration with an AmeriCorps program, like the National Community Conservation Corps, or it could be transitioned to an AmeriCorps program. Those things are tough to spin up super fast because the application process, but depending on what you're doing, you're going to be able to, you know, move forward. It could be done and we did some, some rough estimates of what it would cost to do this. So this is the, the summary of cost estimates for our primary recommendations. And we believe that hooking up low-income subscribers where there is existing service infrastructure. Would be about $7 million for one year of service. In addition, it would be 2.4 million for low-income subscribers without existing service to get mobile-enabled hotspots in their, in their locations and covering the data plan for, for low-income subscribers. And then there is the line extension recommendation that we had that would be a longer-term solution of bringing, whether it's cable or fiber in the places where there is a, a nearby fiber provider to be able to close those, those gaps or those islands. That's about $5.6 million estimate. The booster antennas, which is for those that need, that we think can get cell service, but would need to have the booster to make it consistent enough. Is, is about a half million dollars. And then the estimate that we have for the broadband core, would be 1.2 to 1.5 million for an intensive six month team to be out there doing this work. It's the kind of thing that would not take a high level of, you know, sophistication or, or, or knowledge. It would take folks, you know, that would be, you know, perhaps individuals who've decided to take a year off from college rather than doing college remotely or something like that, could be trained up and then deployed fairly quickly with the kind of equipment to do the assessments and then to be able to help folks troubleshoot and get online fast. In addition, you'll see that there are a number of other questions that are available. In addition, you'll see that there is a legal review in your packet. You know, it's that came out of frequently asked questions. Or proposals to how to address. The issues of broadband access in the state. Here are some of the highlights. I think that is, you know, worth looking at, but I would encourage you to take a look at the entire document. We do think it would be, it's helpful both in the immediate term and scope, but also in looking at the longer term plan and might, might help to shortcut some of the brainstorming. And this was done by both council based in Vermont with each deep understanding of Vermont. Telecommunication rules and law, as well as a national expert, Jim baller, who participated in putting that work together. So that's it for the presentation. And I'm happy to take any questions as, as would Joanne, the committee might have technical difficulty. I'll go back to repeating. I think that's for all that great data and putting that together in short order. It's very helpful. I, I did have a question about the nature of the service that people need and that's around the house symmetrical. It needs to be in order to really make it fully functional. So I don't know if 25 three, I mean it's. I don't know if it's the same number as the other. But you know, I think it's the same thing that we need to be able to do. The same thing that we need to do is to sort of, you know, To the fight in most cases or is that mean. One person in the exchange is doing fine on receiving data, but you end up with a. A broken herky jerky sort of connection back or you can't. I don't know, use remote. Sensing if you're doing telemedicine or things like that. Can you talk a little bit about the. Those, the thresholds that underlie all those numbers. but are you espousing a higher, more symmetrical speed than that for general use? Senator, I would say the 25-3 is your bare minimum. It can work. It is your right. If you've got lots of people, I've got three kids all in school doing remote school at some point during the day, and it can become a challenge. But the feeling is that right now, given those services, it will get you there. It is not a long-term solution. It is not what the state would want over a longer time horizon to be able to really give people access to robust telehealth, and the savings both in time for consumers, having to drive places as well as for healthcare systems, as well as doing online work and sharing of larger data sets or documents or those kinds of things. So it's definitely not the recommendation for the long-term. I'll just speaking for myself, I think that what the legislature set as a 100 over 100 objective is really where you want to be. Some of the providers that are out there are doing much better than that, providing gigabit symmetrical. But in the context of the COVID pandemic, if you could get to 25-3 for all the households, we think it could carry them through, and it takes to do more than that, would just take longer, and so it's an urgency versus quality. It's also why we didn't look that much. We started to explore point-to-point wireless solutions, and you're just not going to get the upload speeds, and it's expensive, and it takes a while to deploy. Do you have a concern or experience elsewhere where you've seen deployments that would fill in like this, that if you build this kind of infrastructure in that it's a regrettably long period of time until anyone comes back to replace or upgrade it? Are you talking about the line extension or the other? I don't know enough to answer the question better, but to what degree are we vulnerable to making an investment that people learn to put up with, and then everyone tired of working on it, and then it takes X number of years to come back again and build something more robust. Let me give two responses to that. For the line extensions in the locations that we were recommending, it's going to be a long time before anyone comes there to deliver anything better than what is immediately around them. Now, some of them may be in places where an EC fiber or a VTEL or a Wasefield telecom is like the bordering entity, in which case they would get very, very good future-proof kinds of broadband, which would be great. In other places, it's just going to be super hard for a CUD, and we're working with a couple of them, to be able to justify a business plan that could overbuild all the stuff around them and then fill in those five or six customers in between. So we felt that that was a reasonable way of doing it that would not adversely impact the CUD's efforts to get to fiber or much faster broadband. The mobile hotspots, I will tell you, you can get by with them, but I don't think there's anyone who's going to say that's my ideal long-term solution, and I think you would continue to see a strong take rate if the option was going to a 100 over 100 minimum service or 500 symmetrical service, which is what EC fiber is offering, over having that kind of device and paying for the data plan that's associated with it. That's a stopgap measure that could help get through until those things are built out. But our feeling is that it would not have the impact center that you're And the very last quick follow-up is just how is Vermont doing compared to other rural states that must be facing a similar challenge? So I'll give my quick assessment and turn it over to Joanne, who's been working with many, many other states. In some ways, doing really well in terms of actually getting fiber out to rural locations, there are a lot of states where it is really bad. What I would say is that on the emergency front, there were other states that moved much more quickly to bring things like mobile hotspots and other kinds of solutions and these kinds of very effective bulk purchases of codes to be able to access already existing programs that are just hard for low income families who are dealing with lots of other things to be able to navigate. It would be hard for any of us to navigate if you look at some of the ways that some of those programs work. So there has been other states that have done that much more quickly. Alabama stands out as one. Joanne, do you want to answer that question from a more national perspective? If that's all right. I just had two basic definitions. Mobile hotspots. We've heard of the hotspots where you have to drive to the general store and sit in the parking lot. I have a sense that you're talking more like one that's connected to a home or a couple homes, but I want to confirm that. And what is a bulk purchase of codes? Joanne, why don't you take both of those? Thanks, Gladly. So, Senator, the term hotspot is used for many different things. And when you think about a Wi-Fi hotspot, so for example, where a town or the state or coffee shop sets up a hotspot, what they're doing is they've got bandwidth coming in usually over a wire and they use Wi-Fi technology to share it with everybody who happens to be in the coffee shop, in the park, outside the store. Like my home. I've got a Wi-Fi downstairs and anybody that comes in can hook on. Exactly. You've created your own Wi-Fi hotspot and that is a strategy that many communities have used very effectively to provide free service, including during the pandemic. When we say mobile hotspots, we're actually referring to something different. And forgive us for not having been more precise about the language. Sometimes we get caught up in jargon because we live with it so much, too. But a mobile hotspot is like when I can buy and many schools have bought and many states and towns and cities have bought devices from AT&T or Verizon. And the devices are about, in some cases, about this big and it's a piece of telecommunications equipment. And what this device does is it functions the same way that my phone does, but it's a little bit more powerful and it receives a mobile signal. And then it allows me to connect with my laptop to the mobile signal that's coming in here as if it was coming to my phone, is now distributed to my laptop and my children's laptops and my husband's laptop. And then we are all doing our work using that mobile connection coming into this device. But I would have to have cell phone connection to do that. And in fact, I have a mobile hotspot like this from AT&T and I also have a Verizon cell phone and I pay for both services separately. And it's not cheap, but in the midst of pandemic, when I'm, for various reasons, I'm not close to home because I'm taking care of family. This is how I've been able to communicate, not with this blue thing, but I don't have my hotspot right here to show you. The beauty of this, of a hotspot device like that though is I can move it around. So as I go from one Airbnb to another, I've been able to take it with me. And if in a place where there is mobile service available, even if there's not a robust fixed service like a wire coming to that home, mobile service for many families has been a lifeline during the pandemic because it's not as good as having a wire but it's a short-term stop-gap measure that has allowed those families to ensure their children are connecting to school and so on. That's what a mobile hotspot is. And that's one of the recommendations we made. It's a mobile product. Ideally, every family in America would have a fixed connection, a really great wire and a mobile connection and nobody would have to rely only on mobile. And in the long run, that's where we're going and that's where you will get in Vermont. But in the short run during the pandemic, our recommendation was that for those families who can't get anything else, if they can get mobile, then one of these hotspots could mean the difference between enough connectivity for distance learning and work from home, the difference between that and not. So that's why we recommended it. And that is, I think to answer Senator Bray's last question related to that, I think that while other states have done more of that sort of thing, subsidizing that kind of service for low income folks, you do have a subsidy program that was developed with your CARES Act funding by the Department of Public Service. It is working, it is operational. We made recommendations about expanding it in the report. But I also think that, in answer to the question, how's Vermont doing relative to the rest of the country, you have had some very creative responses on the infrastructure front in the midst of pandemic and particularly the consumer driven strategy where it's not just the companies deciding how the funds would be spent, but families can apply to the Department of Public Service for that funding, for it to be built to their homes. And that I think is really innovative and it stands out just based on my national experience. I haven't seen a lot of that anywhere else. So I would say you're doing pretty well compared to many states. Certainly you've been very creative. Two other just quick points. One is Senator, in many places, you don't have cell service, right? Which was one of the concerns of using those. But boosters can actually make a huge difference. And that's an antenna that can sit in a window or sometimes outside of the building can aggregate cell services and actually bring a connection where if you're just holding your device, you wouldn't get an adequate cell service connection. So that's why we bake that in there. And what we did is we did an analysis of the reach of the existing towers as far as they would be able to go. We know what the boosters usually are able to accommodate beyond that given topology and then you can actually build that out. The other thing, when I was jumping to the bulk purchase of codes and Senator McDonald would have told me if I were in the committee that I need to stop using jargon. He's vibrating up in my top corner. Gotcha. But basically what it is actually is pre-purchasing broadband service in bulk and then going directly to each family that is qualified and can't afford the broadband service that could be available to their house and actually subscribing for them, I think is the best way to describe it. It just takes out. The hookup mechanism that you're going to provide to the family. Exactly. That's metering. Talk about mixing metaphors, Senator. Oh, you put up one standard and you make a lot of stuff and you parcel it out to various homes on paperwork. Okay. Sure. Senator Hardy. Thank you. And thanks, Matt and Joan, right? Joan, is that the right? Okay. Thank you for your presentation. It was very clear. And I just want to underscore, I think that this presentation is meant to be about an emergency response during the pandemic, not a long-term response to the broadband situation. Okay. And do the mobile hotspot, just a quick tech question, the mobile hotspots that you're recommending, they are 25.3, is that correct? Or is what is their speed? They are capable of 25.3 and beyond. Some of it depends on where you're located relative to the underlying cellular infrastructure. But there are times when I get 75 or 80 megabits, sometimes in both directions. And then there are other times when they're considerably slower, it really depends on how close you are to the infrastructure and how congested the network is at that moment. That's one of the reasons why you're recommending the booster in some cases, I would assume. Yeah, I have a booster at home and it's very helpful. Then I am also really heartened to hear that you think our data, Matt, I've appreciated that you thought the data in Vermont was better than in many places because it's not the message we're getting from sort of in general, from the atmosphere. So that's really great to hear. And I'm curious why this is just rhetorical question, but why the sort of feeling out there is that our data is not very good. But, and I'm also just surprised that Alabama seems to be doing better than us. That's not usually who's doing better than us. But my question- That is a challenge. Yeah, I know, makes me wanna definitely do better. But my question is, is I know that a strategy that a lot of school districts have been using during the pandemic is pretty much exactly what you're recommending, which is to try to get mobile hotspots to students and families who don't have them. And I've seen them do that. I know many families who've gotten them from school districts and have employed basically their staff as this broadband core that you're recommending. Like the school district tech director becomes the person who is helping families do exactly what you're recommending. So I guess my question to you is, did you take that into consideration when you were doing the surveys? Because I know throughout the fall, school districts were beefing, well, starting in the spring even. And then throughout the fall, they were getting those out more and more and more to the point where as of, for example, I was a substitute in our local middle school in the fall after we were out of session and a student came to me and was talking to me about broadband and I immediately went to the tech director and he's like, oh yeah, we've already done that one. So they had sort of covered the bases, that's super anecdotal, but my question is, did you take that into consideration with your data, what school districts were already doing? So survey data is point in time, right? And this was late October, early November. So I'm sure we missed, the school districts are working so hard to try to solve this over a period of time and there were times where school districts were all in person until they weren't, right? So suddenly the urgency went up. So it would be not accurate to say we captured all of the folks who were continuing to push these things out, try to get them out there. I would say that the superintendents who we also surveyed at that exact time still said that we are really struggling even with the existing staff to be able to deploy those. There were also, there were some mobile hotspot carriers that are better than others and the ones that were very inexpensive that a few of the Vermont school districts tried to use right out of the gate were not the ones that we would recommend just given coverage and how they performed in general. So I think that led to a certain amount of frustration. And then finally, it just varied dramatically from school district to school district. Some had the capacity to really throw themselves at this. Some did not. We did talk to folks at the Department of Education and there isn't a centralized mechanism for knowing which school districts have done what, who is deployed to which children, because of the nature of how we do education in Vermont. Ask them for that. Did you, I'm sorry, I just wanted to follow up. You mentioned libraries. Did you get any sense that libraries were also giving out mobile hotspots or were they mostly the fixed hotspot that people were coming to? And then finally, what about colleges and universities? Were they distributing or have they been distributing mobile hotspots to students and professors and staff who are working remotely? So we did, I'll take the second one first. We did not do an in-depth survey of institutions via education. And they all were handling things differently. Middlebury, as I understand it, all went all in person for their instruction. No. No? No, they didn't. They were hybrid. A lot of students came back but a lot of them were remote but most of their classes were remote classes. A lot of students were on campus but anyway, longer conversation. But it's a hybrid. Yeah, UVM had a different approach Norwich had a different approach. We did not incorporate outreach to those institutions into our survey work. But the other question about libraries was interesting. The responses we got from library, very high response rate. Librarians are known to be very good about getting feedback. What we were, and almost all of them were trying to get their Wi-Fi hotspots out to the parking lots. But when we did the survey, only two of them were doing a mobile hotspot lending program which we thought was kind of surprising. So there certainly could be more done there. But many libraries are also struggling with book lending and other kinds of things as they're trying to protect their patrons and their employees. Matt, if I can add to that, I think what we saw in Vermont, Senator, is very consistent with what we've seen across the country which is that schools receive funding through the CARES Act and that enabled them to do things like providing connectivity, whether a hotspot or fixed, they would subsidize, they would buy bulk codes from providers and hand out the codes that families could use to get free service. They would provide devices like Chromebooks because they had funding. Libraries did not receive funding and colleges and universities didn't either. And I think libraries who really aligned with the mission of connectivity and access to education and access to information were in a particularly difficult position because they didn't have physical premises and they didn't have funds for things like hotspot lending unless they had some preexisting source of information. So that does feel like an untapped opportunity, but it's very much a matter of resources. Yes, I agree that libraries are an untapped resource and I have a bill that hopefully will address that. Thank you. I'll give Brock and then Senator McDonald. Thank you. Just a question, I know that you've received some typically diplomatic correspondence from Steve Whitaker in which he has raised the issue that there may be a disconnect between specific tasks that were incorporated in the RFP and what was actually delivered. And I'm just interested in your reaction and response to that. I'll say first of all, before Joanne can comment, we reached out to Mr. Whitaker actually to get his advice because I have known through the years that he is very interested and he chose not to participate in a conversation for recommendations. He had his own reasons, but he did provide some feedback at the sessions, which he was unshy about. And our feeling is that we met the RFP to a T given the constraints that we had for addressing the immediate COVID challenge, it was stressed to us again and again that that was the parameters we had to work within due to the CARES Act capacity. Well, let me just interrupt just for a second, Matt, to ask a question because there was some specificity in the RFP itself and in your response to it that did in fact go beyond the immediate COVID. And I'm wondering, was there some change in the response to the RFP that altered the scope of work to make it different than that which was contracting for? Senator, if I may answer that as the prime contractor in this case and the owner of the company that Mr. Whitaker has claimed has defrauded the state over Montan, that's his language, not mine. I've advised him, by the way, that if he has anything further to say on the topic he's welcome to speak with my attorney. Yeah, I've seen that in your letter. Thank you. So RFP asked us to investigate a wide range of different potential areas that could address broadband challenges during the pandemic. We investigated those areas. In some of those areas, we concluded based on our experience. As we are the person that's always been somewhat that those areas would not be fruitful for purposes of addressing broadband during the pandemic because they are long-term strategies. So for example, neutral host infrastructure, that is a strategy that may make an enormous amount of sense in Vermont and hopefully will be addressed when your tenure plan is written. But that is a multi-year and potentially even a decade or longer to come to fruition to really deliver value. And so what we did is we analyzed that, we evaluated it and we wrote in the report that we did not think that neutral host strategies would result in what was desired here, which was short-term solutions to help the people of Vermont get through a pandemic that is likely to be measured in single years or months, not in decades, hopefully not in decades, hopefully not in many years. So we analyzed it and we concluded that it was not appropriate and we said so in our report. Mr. Whitaker has said that we did not analyze it and that we should have come to different kinds of conclusions. We came to the best conclusion we could based on our analysis, our expertise and our experience and a find accordingly in the report. So nothing changed about our scope of work, nothing changed about what we had proposed. We very much analyzed those things, but we in many cases concluded that that was not gonna be a fruitful area. If Mr. Whitaker disagrees, I am happy to have that conversation with him and I respect his disagreement with our conclusions, but I do not accept the idea that we just ignored entire areas and investigation that were part of our contract with the state. Well, what I look at, I'm not just glanced at this, I haven't gone into it in depth, but one of the things that struck me was there was a specific provision in the RFP and I gather in your response that says, we will develop a 10 year overview of expected future telecommunications requirements across the state based upon an analysis of a range of state specific demographic and economic data and projections, as well as our knowledge of emerging technologies, telecommunications technologies, residential and business usage passage patterns and industry trends. And so that just leads me when I received something like that, I've asked the question is, did you do that? Senator, thank you for clarifying, I'm sorry, I had forgotten about that part. That was the first task in the RFP and we responded to the RFP accordingly. While when we were delivered the contract by the Department of Public Service, we were advised that that task had been removed because it was considered non-compliant with the CARES Act. So it was removed from our final contract and our budget was reduced accordingly. Okay, so that was not in the contract because that's what's up on the website of the department. Still. So it was definitely part of the RFP but it was not part of the final contract and not just that language about the task but also the associated budget was removed. Thank you. I'll clarify things because when I heard 10 years, that threw up a red flag for me for CARES and I know we've got guide house reviewing everything and that's probably about the time they came on board. So. I think it would be useful for us to in effect get a copy of what the final contract was so that we can respond accordingly. Senator McDonald. The last exchange there had to do with long-term trend in the perimeters to which you were limited. I wanna thank you for when I don't understand the very end of that but I understood all the vocabulary words up to the thing that I didn't understand and I thank you on that. We often are trying to answer questions when the vocabulary words are sloppy. My narrow question, when you were talking about extending lines out beyond where they were to get to neighborhoods farther away and you're talking about cable, I assumed you were extending cable farther out. Was there any discussion of if you're going to go farther into new unserved neighborhoods that you would put a technology at the end of cable that met 25, that met symmetrical uses for the time in which the cable was replaced with fiber? Or did you say, oh, we don't have to do that or we're limited to 25, 25, three. And even if we thought putting fiber out beyond cable, knowing that cable was a weaker link in the chain, that we couldn't recommend that because it was prohibited in the study or we thought it was a bad idea. Senator, we did not come to any technology that way and we would always in recommending any kind of investment want to recommend the best and most few investment and certainly higher speeds, symmetrical speeds, fiber, that is where in the long run you want to go. The engineering team looked at a full range of different technologies, including fiber, including extension of the cable broadband plant owned by the cable company, including copper, including fixed wireless, including mobile wireless. And what we did is we had to discount any infrastructure investment that would take so long as to not have impact during the pandemic because our charge was how do we do this during the pandemic? So with regard to any kind of wire, whether fiber or cable or anything else, the only place we recommended construction of a wire is for, and please forgive me, I know this jargon is terribly frustrating. Oh, no, you're doing fine. Thank you. That's my praise. Yeah, doing better than I am, that's for sure. Go. Only line extensions in a certain context. So we didn't recommend that if there's a town down the road we can get the fiber or the cable and it takes the same amount of time to build those two by the way, right? A wire is a wire, but we did not recommend take it all the way to that town down the road and build that whole town because that is a multi-year process. The only place we recommended funding new wires is if there is an unserved pocket within an otherwise served area. So not big contiguous areas that don't have wires but just within a town everywhere is served but there are a couple of roads where there's so low density that there are five homes on a long road and they are unserved because of that low density. That can be relatively quickly built with the same kind of infrastructure that is in the surrounding neighborhood. And that's what we call the unserved pockets or the unserved islands where we recommended line extensions. So if it is, for example, Comcast or in other states who would be another cable company and they surround the whole area but just that one road is surrounded we recommended funding that many, many states have done that during the pandemic because it's cost effective and it's fast. So Mike, thank you for being very precise in what you explained. So if we're dealing with pockets or larger groups of 30, 40, or 50 hamlets that are where you would extend service. The cost, when we're talking about cost when you send out fiber or you send out cable what's the difference in the cost of those two products is not fiber perhaps cost, the labor is the same and this is the same, the next is the same. It's the actual materials that are more expensive for fiber than for cable, is that correct? The cost differences are really immaterial. And unfortunately this is not something that if we're talking about building to a town that is entirely unserved we're gonna build a whole contiguous area that is unserved, they're likely to be largely the same cost depending on who is building whether they already are on the polls what their scale is to the end of the year. Thank you. But it's not the same. So my question is if you're building out beyond where you were when you started your recommendation and the cost of building fiber and cable out are pretty much the same whether it's for 15 homes or 60 homes, did you recommend that they build fiber out there even though the cable that was going to it once it was built was inadequate to power the whole thing but it was there into the future when the cable downstream was replaced with fiber. So you wouldn't have to rebuild it later on given that they're pretty much cost the same same cost to build them to build the two choices. If I were making a recommendation for a whole town that has nothing, I would almost certainly recommend fiber although I'd always want to have very specific circumstances and it's challenging with the hypothetical to say it has one or another but if it's five homes or 10 homes within an area that is already surrounded by cable it would be much, much more costly to have somebody come in and build new fiber than to just have the cable company extend its existing plant to those five homes that are already relatively close to its existing plant and not just that it's more costly on the capital side but there's no one who's going to make that investment or want to operate it. So the cable company is already in much of that town and they're just five or 10 or 15 homes in that town. The assumption was that you can hook it up to coax the same way you hook it up at the other end when you go from fiber to coax you could go back down to fiber. So you've answered my question and the answer is you chose not to do that for a variety of reasons. Thank you. Understanding, I'm thinking back is I thought what I heard Senator McDonald asking but I'm not sure it is technically possible. I understand we've got this little donut hole that doesn't have, and it's all surrounded by a cable company and you're talking about filling that little donut hole with something. I think what he was asking is where you connect that line is there a technology that would allow that line to be fiber? Is there, I remember discussions about connection boxes and is there something you can do that would make it, can you make it? Is it technically possible to hook it up? Yeah, I mean, can it be made compatible? It is potentially technically feasible depending on the individual circumstance. It might actually be more expensive because it might require specialized equipment to go back from coax to fiber but it's not the way the cable broadband companies build. It's not how they operate and it's simply, it's not what they do. Whether that is- That does not bother Senator McDonald. What they do is short sighted for profit monopolies and many of those things we don't agree with and do not wish to- That's true. I wasn't getting into that, so I will get sucked into it if you want to bring it up. But I definitely wasn't what I was getting into. It is Friday afternoon, Senator. Your cows need to be fed. They don't know days of the week, either do I. Senator, I will just share that CTC technology and energy is a company that recommends and designs fiber networks all the time. Given the choice, we would always want fiber. We would not make recommendations about extension of cable infrastructure if we did not think that was in the very good interests of those folks who cannot currently get service. And once that infrastructure is there, the upgrade from coax to fiber is not nearly as difficult. We're not close to that upgrade anyway. We could be years away from that but that cable infrastructure would get those families speeds measured in the tens and hundreds of megabits in relatively short order. I will admit, I have never been in a position of requiring the cable company to build fiber rather than coaxial cable for their distribution plant of that sort. So I don't know how they might react to it but the extension of cable broadband would meet all of the needs of those families in the foreseeable future. In under the 25.3 standard. Well, 25.3 and beyond that, a cable broadband plant can get considerably higher speeds than that in the downstream direction, much more challenging in the upstream direction as you know. 25.3, that's symmetrical. Thank you. Remember, this is an emergency plan to get it out the door and get those kids hooked up before they, you know, it, the alternative is sitting in Sub-Zero weather in the parking lot at the gas station to download your homework. I mean, that's what we were looking at. We do many things in the short term that are expensive and wasteful and then we scratch our heads and said, boy, if we'd only done the other thing when we opportunity was there, we should have, but that's a different. I think we're doing better this time than we did the last time. I'm not trying to take up any more time but don't, don't bait me or, and I'll be quiet. No baiting. Senator Brock. Just a question regarding the hotspot idea. Did you do any analysis about the availability of cellular coverage with respect to hotspot availability? Because I think that generally the places that don't get internet don't get cell phone either in Vermont. Am I wrong? We did do an analysis and we used a process of looking where towers exist and where they propagate to be able to show where they reach including topographical maps. There is additional cell phone coverage that has been or should be going online shortly from AT&T as part of their first net process which we also tried to incorporate as being available in the near term. And then that's why the boosters we felt was an important component. There are places where you can get cell service and you can't get decent broadband particularly. I mean, there's specific places in the central Southern part of the state and in other locations. So we did that analysis though using fairly sophisticated, not perfect but fairly sophisticated tools to be able to determine who should have cell service and then who would be able to have cell service if they had a booster. There are still ones left out and that's why we have other kinds of solutions that we were suggesting. We looked at TV white spaces off of Mount Mansfield. We looked at all kinds of stuff. And again, the other thing that we have in Vermont is we have the drive test data. Unlike other states, someone got in a car and drove around so that we could actually verify where there is cell service and where there is not. There might be some situations where the drive test data showed that it was at the end of the driveway but if you went the 75 feet up the driveway, not so great but that's again where boosters can really make a difference in aggregating cellular signals and providing a service. Well, I do know one of the issues about these hotspots is the one of cost. And I think also one of carrier advertising. Verizon is notorious for advertising unlimited hotspot service. And then in verified print, what unlimited means is that once you hit the limit, your service speed drops down to 600K. And so it's not unlimited. I mean, frankly, I think it's consumer fraud but that's an issue. So the whole issue of using hotspots as a means for connectivity, for ongoing school activities and so on, particularly if you have a family situation, runs into these kinds of cost constraints and these kinds of bandwidth limits before what is quote unlimited gets limited. I'll let Joanne respond because she's been involved with more of these. I'm not, Senator, I'm not gonna disagree with you at all. One of the negotiation pieces that has come out of these efforts in other states is significantly dropping the cost for both the device as well as for the data plans. During the time of the pandemic, there is no saying where they would go beyond the contract that the state would negotiate for this time-delimited period. But there were examples of being able to get the devices themselves for 99 cents, right? In bulk purchase for this particular purpose and the like, which is what would be put in place. Joanne, do you wanna, if it's okay, just add to that. Yes, Senator, I think all of your concerns are extremely well-founded and there are other challenges as well. The network gets congested. We've got lots and lots of people on those networks right now because of the pandemic and there's that much more congestion. The pricing is a lot better than it used to be. The terms are better and the service is better, but it is still at best and a band aid and not a great band aid. But while we are in this pandemic and until we have what we need to build long-term future-proof infrastructure, the band aid's better than nothing. And I think that's where a lot of communities have ended up. And I wanna be clear about our recommendation on the subsidy program. We are not recommending only mobile hotspots. On the subsidy front, what we have said is we recommend whatever networks are there, whatever can be leveraged, be leveraged because just handing out hotspots while it'll help those folks who can only get broadband through mobile service on a hotspot, there are many folks who live in places where there is adequate fixed service and they can't afford it. And we wouldn't wanna give them a lesser alternative. The subsidy should apply to everything. Everything that is viable and where there's a company that's willing to participate and that's what we've seen with some of the more successful programs around the country. When Matt mentioned Alabama, that's where they have been particularly innovative. It's on that expanding the reach of the subsidy. It turns very, very reasonable. All right, thank you. This has given us a lot to think about. Hopefully we won't have another pandemic for a while but we may have other things that we need to deal with. I lost Senator Brock and now at one point I had two senators, Sir Rodkins. Right now it looks like he's kind of dropping in a parachute or something out in the oceans or the mountains. Now I've only got one. I'm more comfortable with one. Senator Hardy, you have a question. I just have a comment or a suggestion. And I also just think it's really kind of eerie how all of our rooms have gotten dimmer and dimmer as we've been on. I noticed everybody looks darker right now. But to the point that Matt and Joanne made about resources and school districts having had CARES Act money to be able to buy hot spots but libraries and other places not having them, it seems to me that if we wait for the entire budget process to get to being able to provide funding for the purchase of hot spots or the distribution of hot spots that it's gonna be the summer which kind of defeats the purpose especially for education purposes. And I'm just wondering as we are looking at the funding for that is coming from the federal money or if there's an opportunity to do anything in the budget adjustment so that we can get something out earlier to be able to do hot spots or get further the distribution of hot spots. So I just wanted to put that in your ear, Senator Cummings as you talk with our counterparts on the Appropriations Committee. Just this seems like an issue that we might want to speed up getting resources out to the communities. Senator, one thing just to flag is that and I hope I'm not speaking out of school here is that there was the $3 million subsidy program that the department attempted to put together that had very little subscription. And so I believe those funds were not used to a large extent. I know there's a lot of discussion about now that there's an extension on those dollars who decides where those dollars go as well as whether there is a different purpose on the longterm, there is an immediate need. And from the experience that Joanne has had in other states there is the ability to deploy things like these kinds of hot spots very, very fast. You can put together a program, get them out there and get people connected within a matter of weeks if the funding is available. So, and that's why- That's exactly my point, Matt. And so I didn't realize there was $3 million left from our earlier efforts with the original CARES funding. But if we can get our fingers on that and get that appropriated on the sooner side, that's the better because if there's clearly a need right now this plan was supposed to be for right now, not over the summer and wanting to see if there's a way we can do this in the budget adjustment or some other avenue early on. I'm trying to figure out what this is because we- Deploying funds for hot spots in particular. I mean, that would be one of their, and the whole like hot spot core or whatever. I think that's a great idea. We're gonna need people to do it, but more so we have some people who could do this work already in sort of existing institutions, but we don't have the funding for them to distribute the hot spots. I think I remembered 42 million. Was that the car? Was it 4.2? It's late. I'm not sure that's appropriate for budget adjustment, but that's beyond my pay grade. We can talk to Senator Kitchell about that, but generally that's just a truing up of costs that have come in. It doesn't do new appropriations unless it's an emergency. And probably the first place is to ask the department, are they, do they still have $3 million? And, what would it take? And then find out why the libraries didn't subscribe. But some libraries have been doing call in order books and others have been completely shut down. So, and a lot of towns don't have libraries at all, probably ones that could use things the most or have one person in the library. So, it'd be something to look at, but I don't know if it's gonna go by the next week or two. I'm not specifically saying libraries. I was just an example. I'm saying some way of means of distributing the hotspots. I would say that the advantage that they were able to get in other states, which I think you still could, it would be on a smaller scale than certainly what we're recommending as to fully address the problem. The advantage is when you bulk purchase, when you negotiate for a single tranche and data plans as well as devices. And then to your point, Senator Hardy, distributing them through whatever mechanism necessary. I mean, you can, you can contract. I would not put it on the department to do that distribution necessarily just because of their capacity, but through whatever kinds of peg access stations, CUDs, there are lots of folks who could help with that, but you'd wanna have that bulk purchase all at once rather than just doing it individually. I can see last time we purchased a whole bunch of small sell and I'm not, and we still have a warehouse full. Microcells? Micro, yes. We sent a few down to Puerto Rico. I don't even know if they use them. So I can understand where the department might be a little gun shy about bulk purchasing equipment, but it's definitely as we go forward something to talk about. But again, technology changes so quickly. The next time we have a crisis we could end up with another warehouse full of unusable technology. At 99 cents a piece, I don't think it's a different deal. And I'm sure after the pandemic they're still useful for library loans and things like that. So I don't think it would be a corollary to your warehouse. Okay, good. I'm just saying I can see where the department might be a little gun shy because it seems to me they got somewhat beaten up by this committee over that process. Madam Chair. Senator Bray. No, we didn't beat them up, Senator. No, we're beating them up for allowing tax money to be used not in accord with our goals, but that's a bit like that. Okay. Senator Bray. Like I've used hotspot a couple of times, I sell your hotspot and they, so they're brand specific, right? So is there, how do you deal with that? For instance, I'm in Bristol and I just changed my service because my AT&T signal was one bar but my new Verizon signal can be four on a good day. So how do you know what kind to buy or does an AT&T hotspot play nicely with they're not actually brand specific? It'll pick up the Verizon signal and swap, right? I mean, I know there's some, they're competitors so they don't necessarily like to play nicely with each other's signals but I don't know if that applies to this as well. It does, unfortunately. Uh-huh. The hotspot devices are locked down to a single provider. So in order to get service from Verizon, you have to buy their device which is configured for the spectrum they are using and the same for T-Mobile and the same for AT&T and so on. And that is one of the challenges. There's not a lot of opportunity for consumers to move among them without having to go by a new device much as with phones. Okay. The other quick question is, I don't know if it's in your report and I'll look forward to reading the full report. Senator Brock is often cautioning us against signing people up for service. They become dependent upon them. We use federal dollars to get them. We prime the pump with federal dollars and then either we have to basically walk away from supporting them or we now have to fundraise, find money to continue the support. Do you get into the level of ongoing commitment somebody needs to make if we're gonna continue to support this interim solution into the near future, like the next year to two years, that kind of thing? Senator, the report estimates what a year of support for low income Vermonters would cost and it would presumably, unless additional efficiencies could be realized through negotiations with the providers based on volume discounts and so on, it would continue at that level. Congress did in the appropriations law that became law right at the end of last year, appropriate $3.2 billion that the FCC is going to give out as a subsidy for low income and newly unemployed Americans to try to get us through the pandemic. The expectation is that that $3.2 billion is doing that one third of the families who are eligible take advantage of it, that it's about six months worth of support. So it's not a long-term solution. And the FCC probably won't have that program up and running until about April. And it is short-term. You are quite right about the federal government not providing something in the long-term. There is discussion in Washington. There's definitely sentiment amongst some that this should be a permanent long-term opportunity. I think that would be quite a battle in the US Congress, we don't know. But that at least is something that will help with this challenge during some of the months remaining in the pandemic. But there is no federal strategy that we know of for long-term support. And at the state level, the numbers are in the report. But it would, there's, I don't know that there's any help coming from Washington post-pandemic. Thank you. Madam Chair, I can barely hear you. Can you hear me? We can hear you fine. Am I better if I get closer? Yes, now I hear you. I just, I just want a second Senator Hardy's interest in finding out about this $3 million that was not put to use that was intended for broadband. And also I can say that things are moving very fast already in the appropriations committee. I know they're working on budget adjustment. And I think they're working on a separate corona relief package, a CRF package now, because they're trying to sustain a housing program. So I also would be curious to know what's going on. So that ship doesn't sail without us exploring the broadband possibilities in the short term. I can't hear you. I think that's cause I'm writing notes. And I've got about an eighth of an inch clearance where I get in and out of range. I'll see what I can find out about the $3 million. I think the testimony was it's there because it was unsubscribed. Nobody asked for it. So maybe we can find out why it may just be because they were so busy with other things and we could do a better job of promoting that. And the first thing is, is the $3 million still there? Or was that rescinded and repurposed somewhere else in the last couple of months? So we'll find that out and go from there, okay? All right, any final questions? Hopefully it has been- Senator Sorokian, it looks like you just fell off the mountain. Yeah, now you're back. I'm gonna start banning these backgrounds. It reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons when it's growing up, like characters fly in and then they fly out again. Ends change shape? Yes, okay. Further discussion on anything? Okay, if not, thank you. Matt, Joanne, this has been helpful. Mr. Whittaker will be in probably sometime next week, but I told him he can make his comments to us. I'm glad you've had a chance to tell us your explanation. And if anything else comes up, we'll get the questions to you for answering, okay? Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you for your time. You've got enough of a challenge with this committee. Okay, thank you everyone. Have a good weekend or three days, avoid Montpelier, unless you're coming to spend a lot of money. And we'll see you on Tuesday.