 Anyway, so welcome to the CB5 workshop for anybody who wants to learn about everything we've been trying to do. Anyway, I am David Healy, the Calis Delegate, Volunteer Delegate to CB5er. Sitting on my left is Alan Gilbert, the delegate from the town of Worcester. And to my right we have Linda Goudel, who's the delegate from Waterbury. And then we have Janelle Smith, who's the Executive Director of CB5er. Very familiar from the Watesfield Champlain Telecom, Lee Cheeney from Watesfield Champlain Telecom. So, we've got CB5er, and then Watesfield is our operator. So as we go along, we may have questions about how that's gonna work. What I'd like to do is start with the question that I get all the time. Thank you. Chris, when am I gonna get it? Get it. So I wanna give the little short history because as much as everybody's been wanting us, it's been a long, cold road for the volunteers who've been working on this for five years. So just to give you a little brief, because we had a lot of startup and planning organization meetings. We didn't know where we're gonna get money. We didn't know how we're gonna do what we're doing. So we finally got there and we hired an engineering firm to help us do the design and they're still helping us manage the construction. And then we had an operating partner, which is WCBT, and then we had to do a lot of hustling for grants, which took a bunch of time and took testimony before the state to get it, but we're happy that the American Rescue Plan provided the state of Vermont enough money to put in 200 million into Fiber in Vermont, of which CV Fiber got 23 million. And every contract we have, which are numerous, requires bidding, review, and hiring. So if you wanna know why things take so long, and then you can have every weather problem in the world happen to you. So winter building didn't work so well for us. So we're really slow to start this year. And finally in central part of the callus, it's ready to go. We think we'll be lighting it up by the first week in August for the first zone. And the second zone should happen pretty much, pretty quickly after that, probably a month, maybe six weeks after that. So if you're in CL01, which is central callus and part of East Montpelier, that's first and then a chunk of Worcester and chunk of East Montpelier going next. And I'll show a map in a minute. So in terms of engineering design, this is the hard part to explain to people it's not a town boundary based system. There are five zones in callus, not all of them being opened or built at the same time. So that's gonna be some people who are in callus who say, what do you mean I didn't get it? Well, I'm sorry, but it's the way the engineering went. East Montpelier has three zones. Worcester has two zones and Middlesex has three zones. All of them have a different sequence of construction. And then you add to that the construction itself, is what I just said. So there you go. That's my slide on timing. So these are the 24 districts that make up the CB fiber network. So if you can look at callus as a green, that's the CL01. So that's the first district that's being served. And then the next pink one to the left, West Callus in Padawuster in Padawester in East Montpelier is next. And then so forth going to Worcester and Middlesex. This, before I get too carried away and people ask me, so where are we now? This is as of last Friday. This is where we have strung fiber. I know there's a lot, there's about 60 more dots that should be on there running down County Road, but they're not in there. They will be probably next week. But you can see the green area is pretty well covered. I think there's only about five or six more houses that will be passed in East and in Callus. And you can see our contractors are already working in Worcester and Middlesex. And the notion was they're moving to where they can quickly attach fiber as opposed to slogging through a swamp like they've had to do in Callus. It's been pretty rough going for them. Anybody seen our trucks around the town? I'm stuck out of the road. Oh yeah, I meant the flood, right? Yeah. That was the splitter truck. The splitter truck, yeah. Hey, could you talk a little bit about this? Could what? Talk a little bit. Talked loud, okay. So anyway, CB5 is locally owned, managed broadband service. It's a municipal entity comprised of the volunteer 20 towns. So we're, you know, we can go to the bond bank which we're planning on doing. We can, you know, basically the only thing we can't do is tax you. So all we can raise money by is through subscriptions. So it's operated by, it's gonna be operated by WCVT. So so far we've received $23 million in construction grants from the state of Vermont. 800,000 total between town, American rescue plan money with a state 50% match. So Callus put in 200,000. State put in 200,000. So Callus has got an extra 400,000 to make connections. So that's all good news. The problem is that the cost to build the whole network is about $60 million. We now have determined in the last month that we're gonna run out of money probably by November. That's a good guess. That's a good guess. And so we know there will only be finished construction in operation of the Callus, so it's CLO1, CLO2, RS01, RS02, and what am I missing one? Oh yeah, CLO3, which is Woodbury. And Woodbury hasn't started at all because Hardwick Electric has not made their poles ready for us to attach to. And this is a problem. RS01 is Middlesex, Middlesex. RS01 and RS02 are Middlesex. So we have a few problems with make ready, which I forgot to mention is one of our series of problems. You have to apply for permits and then pay the utility the money to prepare the poles. And that's either a new replacement pole or it's moving the cable and the telephone wires down so we can, for some reason, we have to be at the top of the pole. So that's taken a big hit on us in terms of time and money. In terms of slowing down things. So from our perspective, why should you sign up? I don't know, how many people have consolidated DSL? Yeah, okay. Well, you're desperate, you're desperate, you're desperate. So I mean, you need better speed. We also hope that we can provide top notch customer service. It would be another thing we would advocate subscribing to us. We don't have any gimmicks, there's no contracts. The prices, what the prices are. So local y'all and local customer service and we need you to help us succeed. So you wanna know how the base rate was $79 where that number come from. So we had a five year financial model done of building the network. How much it was gonna cost, how much it was gonna cost to run. And it came out, we needed per customer $90 assuming that only 40% of people took the service. So it's sort of a longer term thing. Tuesday night I was asked, is the price gonna come down? Well it isn't gonna come down to the near term. We can tell you that much. But maybe it won't go up either. It won't go up, that's what we can tell you that too. So that's sort of our backend story. So how do I get, what do I get? Well you get the highest broadband speed we have. So you have 100 over 100, that means 100 up and 100 down. And if you only have four right now that's quite a bit of a difference. If you have, the connection will be free. This is a distance limit. We're providing 400 feet of connection aerially or underground. But we're not providing the conduit. So if you have an existing conduit that might work and when the weights feels technician comes out to your house, show them what you got and maybe you can use that and maybe not and I'll let them explain if there are any questions on that rather than me. But if you have an aerial connection, it's 400 feet or less, it'll be no problem at all. And that's covered. And what if it's more than 400 feet? It's a dollar a foot after 400 feet. It's an installation fee. Well, the installation fee is part of the 99 bucks, right? Yeah, but you didn't say it. So it's free. Okay, then is a $90 startup charge. It includes. 99 dollars. 99 dollars. So with that. Is that 400 feet from the last power pole or from the last power pole? Oh, go ahead. So it is from the last takeoff pole to your house. So where your power service comes into that house. Where the transformer is. Yes. Okay, yes. So how will stuff, there's two of us on that little stuff. So if there's a shared, if it's less than 400 feet from that main takeoff pole, then you're good. The main pole somewhere down on the road. Not the one up by the house. You said the transformer is, right? Is the transformer up by the road or by the stop? Up by the house. Up by the house and be up to the house. Okay, thank you. Even if you're a single transformer up by the house. Yes. And when the technician gets there, he'll go over that stuff. And if there's anything that looks like it's not, you know, gonna jive, he'll let you know. I got a phone call today. I think I wanted service and I didn't know the price. So I said, I think so. I don't know. They are in the neighborhood because we passed one of our guys on the way up and we were like pretty surprised. They're making calls to make sure that you signed up for service. And what they want to do is try to get somebody scheduled, they'll call you to get somebody scheduled to come out and do the site visit. And that site visit's really important because then they can tell what the footage is gonna be. They can give you any pricing if it is indeed gonna be more. They'll look at your existing buried service and conduit that Consolidated might use. They'll pull, they'll tug and they'll say, yeah, we think we can get something through there. Or if not, then they'll say that you're probably gonna have to put conduit in for us to be able to pull something through. And this building is actually a pretty good example because David showed us, our technicians were a little ahead of us and the fibers actually already pulled through the conduit into the back room here. It's not terminated or obviously active because the network's not active yet, but it's actually, they were able to come off the mainline pole through the existing conduit and it's all coiled up in the back room there, so. Which is progress. A lot of moving pieces and as we get things done ahead of time, it goes quicker once it's all ready. Why don't you describe what they get when they get an installation? What they get? Okay, so this sort of simulates what a cabinet looks like out in the field and although this goes in the cabinet and this is the electronics, this feeds a boot out into the field called a splitter and there'll be 32 customers out of that boot or eight or 10, they have different size depending on how many customers are around that. And then that fiber will feed to a box that goes on the side of the house and it's similar to this but it's a little bit bigger. And in that box, they'll make a splice and they'll run fiber through the house into this device right here that needs power. They'll need commercial power in the house. Usually they'll go in the basement by the electrical panel or somewhere but it doesn't have to go there, you know what I'm saying? This is called an optical network terminal. So this is where the fiber terminates to. So that's the actual laser. This is the laser, yeah. So out of this box, there'll be a blue ethernet cable that will go to this box and this is your router and this is your Wi-Fi device and while the technician's there, they'll go around to have tools to measure and see where you have Wi-Fi or where you might want Wi-Fi that you don't get today off your DSL lines and all that stuff. They'll go around the house and say, we can do it all with just this device right here or they say, well, this isn't gonna reach the back, you know, ports that you might wanna sit there with your laptop so they can try a bigger device or this device has extenders and they can give you prices, they're all listed, all the prices and stuff like that and they'll do a snapshot. We have these things called pronto forms so they set it up, they read the levels, they go through all that, they document on a form that we save so if a trouble comes in later down the road, we can bring up those forms. They do pictures of where the devices are set and all the levels and they'll say, oh, well, when we put it in, it was at a neg 21, now it's a neg 40, something's different and they can figure out much quicker what's going on. So does one of those devices go in each room where you want Wi-Fi? No, like from this box, this ONT ethernet cable will go here and this will light up most homes, the whole home. Yeah. The Wi-Fi speed is the same as the incoming laser speed? Well, the incoming laser speed, so always when you have incoming laser, if you take an ethernet cable and plug it into here and into your laptop, that's gonna be your highest speed ever. It's always connectivity-wise. The cable doesn't have to limit it, you know. Well, it could, but that's why everybody uses Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi speeds. So the one thing, Wi-Fi will never be as reliable and it will never be as fast as a wired connection, right? You can come off that fiber optic into a wired connection and that is by far always going to be your most reliable. It's just a lot of physics, right? Okay, that's just the Wi-Fi speed. The Wi- What's the degradation? Well, yeah, so these are all the latest, it's the standard, it's all Wi-Fi six equipment, right? So it's only as good as your device and the location you are in your home in terms of the Wi-Fi. We will optimize it, obviously, for the best performance. Depending on the size, the construction of your house, you may need additional mesh Wi-Fi access units that are available to propagate that signal to every room you want, to every place. I mean, some people want it out to the, you know, church act in the backyard, that's all doable, but it takes additional equipment to make that happen. But they'll test and show you what your Wi-Fi speeds are prior to them leaving. Like he says, it's always the equipment. You could have a 20-year-old laptop that only does, you know, eight mags. Or your iPhone, right? Or your iPhone. Yeah, so just for illustrative purposes, like you go through, you know, just your average sheetrock wall, you're losing half your signal strength in your Wi-Fi signal. Like if you look at it with a Wi-Fi analyzer. And then everything is an interferer, right? Everything from your washer and dryer, your refrigerator, the radiant floor heat, the fieldstone fireplace, low-eat glass, any metal roofing, all that stuff. Force air plaster. That's all reflective material that Decker, it's an unlicensed Wi-Fi. That doesn't mean it's not gonna work. It's just gonna mean it may have taken additional device or some moving the devices around in a particular way to make it work. To maximize that performance. Let's do a couple of hands. David, you wanna, you know everybody, so. Well, no, I didn't see who was for a stove, right? Just a quick one about getting the phone call. So, will we be here and see, I'm a CV fiber, or just because of security? Yeah. Or is it gonna be a... I believe that they'll represent themselves as CV fiber and it's a Watesfield Telecom employee that will come out. And on all of our employees, is that what he did? Yeah. Cause he received the call today. I got a call today. It was a Watesfield telephone. Representing CV. Yeah, I came on the phone. Yeah. Does it say Watesfield? Yeah. And all of our employees, so if anybody does come to the house, our employees from Watesfield will have a CV fiber ID badge with their picture on it. Okay? And then on the flip side of that, I think on the back side. We have three different ones. But they will have a badge and if you request for them to show them that badge, then they know that they need to show it to you. So we are working in the area, as Lee said, we're doing two things. One are the pre-installation site surveys as well as running drops, some drops now, just trying to get ahead of that initial demand so that once the network is all ready to go, we can, it'll speed up the installations. Cause one piece is these, the drops up here as you can imagine with off-road, most of the pull lines being off-road, they're a little challenging. Our techs have already been in the rivers right across the woods, through the woods, over to Grandma's house, back over, right? It just takes time. So a drop, it goes from the utility pole to your house. That's what a drop is. Yeah, can you tell me the price of digging a concrete necessary for a foot? We don't have big estimates on that. Yeah, no idea. It can range because any contractor, you know, can come in and put a two inch conduit in and he's gonna bill you whatever. We can't come up with an accurate. So you don't dig yourself to having a concrete? You can dig your own conduit. Yeah, you can do your own conduit if you'd like. And on the website, there's specs and everything that we go by for people that just want to do it themselves. I don't mind. So people can dig it. Don't worry, you can dig your own. Whatever he has to say. Okay. How deep does it have to be? 16 inches. Yeah, that's quite a bit. Yeah, and those specs are on the website. I may be a foot. I think I have them on the table. Yeah. Are you gonna have a list of reputable contractors? They're on to the website. They're on the website. They're on the handout, too. One thing I wanted to say is if anybody does have a question about a certain employer or somebody that comes knocking at your door and you're not comfortable, certainly call those the CB fiber number that's on the website. You'll get our customer service and you just ask them, is do you have anybody out in our area working and they'll get a hold of the person of people that we can identify and say, yeah, we have people out there just to keep you guys safe if somebody comes out there. I have a question for you. I'm just gonna clear. We are at the top of a five-pole sperm of a green mountain parlor. Does that... Where? What road? Gossum Hill Road. At the top of Gossum Hill Road. We're talking... Can you just walk down? Do you know where Stover Road is? Yes. Oh, God. Across the road. Oh, God. Oh, God. Across the road, up the hill. And so I'm wondering, I know you have treks going down in 2014. I've seen doing stuff. But we're a five-pole sperm off of that. I have two questions. Number one, is that gonna count as you have to pay the distance? And number two, the problem I have, we actually have extremity. And the problem we have is that it's signal slows. There's four houses on it. I forget. And the signal slows as you get to the top. So our speed at night really declines. Is that problem with your equipment? You have your own. You're a dedicated fiber link back to the equipment. So you have your own. Once it gets to the equipment, it shares. But it's not like cable. It's not like coax. Okay. The whole road's not sharing the same signal. So if you're going to get a hundred over a hundred. You're gonna get a hundred over a hundred. No matter what time. We have a slave problem in CLO-1 on Route 14. You do. That Green Mountain Power gave us a bill of $300,000 to replace the poles that are in the swamp. You're kidding. And they told us, oh, next year we're running it on the ground on Route 14. So we said, well, we'll wait and we'll put conduit on Route 14. So that stretch, and I'm not sure if it's actually you or not. It probably will, because before Stillport Road, it does go through the swamp. Because we did a lot of praying in the rain. Yeah, I bet. So I got in. And that particular stretch, and since Renee is here, it's screwing up East Cowell's Village. Yes. And everybody there. But. So you're on your way. It was like ridiculous and a part of me not knowing. Okay, go for it. Just a question about your modem and Wi-Fi. How strong is it compared to the consolidated modem Wi-Fi? So, because if we don't have rabbit ears on that, there's no. Yeah, everything's got internal. I mean, these are newer. This is the newest newer equipment. That being said, they're all the same power levels. The FCC, because it's unlicensed spectrum, they all cap. So these are 2.4 gig and five gigahertz as well. 2.4, only has three channels, propagates really well. Five gigahertz has lots of channels, so cruising lanes, it's higher bandwidth, higher frequency, but because it's higher frequency, doesn't propagate as well. So we use it for each new, it's a combination, right? Again, it depends on your device and it will negotiate with whichever devices are connecting to make sure that signal's optimized. But it's, again, in terms of coverage, it really depends on. It's our technicians that when they're in the house, they're gonna be going around, you know, measuring and they'll say, well, if you want it to be good signal here, you may need another device here or not. Or they may say, well, instead of having this with three different extenders around the house, he may say, let's just go with this one. So. And then the other piece is where it can be logically placed, right? While the best location might be the middle of the living room, that's not always practical. So while that might be the best, provide the best coverage, right? It's still in the location in terms of, here's where we're gonna mount it, here's what the coverage looks like. So that's one of the things we said about the technicians going out there is, don't leave and have somebody be unhappy about their Wi-Fi coverage, because that simulates their broadband. When they come in, my broadband sucks, my fiber, no, that's not the way it is, is if your Wi-Fi's good, then you're gonna be happy. And they won't leave the house until it's good. If you, before they get there, they're gonna test it when they get there to see what you got today. And then when they leave, it will be much better than what you have today. We have these internet cables running all over the house. Sometimes we turn the Wi-Fi on when somebody visits. So are we gonna be able to access the turn-on, turn-off with the Wi-Fi ourselves? Yes, yes, yep. And it'll take your Wi-Fi, it'll take your cable right into the back of that. Yeah, I know all about that. The automated turn-on. Yeah, you can. So we have Starlink, and I'm wondering how, do you know how the distribution or capacity that compares to their central router distributor, because we have a really large house, and that gets to every room in the house, including a porch out on the patio. I wouldn't be able to do that. Do you have any mesh routers now? No, in the kitchen and it goes every room. They're all similar because they're all using the same fabric reference boards that come out. There's only really two manufacturers that made the underlying shifts out there and then the Wi-Fi would know right away. They're so much similar, obviously. It's absolutely going to be similar. We'll bring the notion that if you have one of those, it'll likely do your whole house. Yeah, and that's what we find. We find that. But we do find, right, there's always extenuating circumstances for construction sites where they want it. So really, we find stuff on the fringes where people are challenged, like car chargers in the garage, et cetera. Go fix them. So we're all on Comcast, I want to get off of Comcast. But the question is, do you also do telephone, or is it just? Okay, it was the telephone person. Right there. Really, you could offer telephones? So that's two of the questions. The other is, I think, Jane just brought it up with the safety. I'm one of these ones that I don't want Wi-Fi in every room, you know. So, I mean, that was good, I mean, David made, but I don't. So, I mean, is there a way to, and you just said there was a way to. There's a way to turn it on and turn it off. There's not a way to segment it. No, that's okay. Within the house, like to have it on in the kitchen, but not in the kitchen. And when you talked about the laser, I didn't understand what the laser has compared to what we have now. Right, well the laser is just a, this thing puts a light onto the glass, onto the frame. Fiber optics is all optical, so it's all lightweight. I was gonna say, fiber is actually made up of glass fibers. Yes. So it only transmits light. Yeah. So when you said laser, you said. Yeah, so in this piece of fiber, it's got protection bending so you can do that, but there's a hair piece of glass all the way through it. And how this equipment works with this stuff is it shoots light out. And the laser is what shoots the light out. So yeah. Thank you. It's really that it goes into the theories of radiation, which a lot of people feel the laser is better than. Yeah, I mean. What made the Comcast would use any help for that? Well, right, I mean they're using RF, right? Which is a radio frequency over that coaxial cable in this case, right? It's using light waves, pulses of light over the optical fiber. Okay, you had a question on telephone. Telephone. So we are offering a telephone package through Waitsville Telephone. It's $29 a month. And you have the option of including a battery backup or is it required? No, it's optional. Optional. So the battery will allow the phone to work on the power outage. And so that's one of the advantages of that. So this is what the batteries look like right here. And it's optional, you can even have a battery just for your broadband if you want. And this battery has options that you can stack on. So one battery, eight hours, but we can stack them up. You can get multiple batteries for 20 hours. So do we have a generator? Oh yeah, that's the best. Well, main battery, we have a generator. So does that mean we can eliminate our landlines that we need some of them now? You certainly can eliminate your landline, your phone number. Yeah, if you're consolidated today with your phone, you would port your number, we would port it, and you could save the same phone number. And you could do away with their service. And then off the back of this device, there's a phone port right here. And we would just run the cable into that and here are existing phone lines that go through the rest of the house. And the technician would do that when he's there. So as lines, it's not battery, it's like Comcast is actually. Yeah, so if you get phone service from us, the only way that service is gonna stay up if the power goes out is if you have a battery or if you have a generator. And that's the same thing with Comcast. Same with Comcast, yeah. Traditionally when Waitsfield gave phone service over our copper lines, we fed that service from the phone office which has big, big batteries. And that's why your phone would never go out of service in the olden days, but over fiber, we can't run power over. We can't feed power over to the copper, we could. That's the difference. Why would you need the service package on the battery? There's a service package? For maintenance. So these batteries like, so they do go bad. They'll run out of charge. And if you're running it on battery all the time, the life of this won't last a year. So with the maintenance packages, we'll come out and replace that. I believe that's what. We'll come out and replace it at no charge. We can monitor these batteries in the central office so we know when the batteries are going bad and all that. And we'll pre-empt, go out and change batteries or give your con and say, hey, it looks like your battery's bad if you're on that maintenance plan. We lose power for three days or four days once a year. Yeah. That might make a lot of sense to pay for that service contract. Yeah, it's totally optional. Yeah, it's optional. It's totally optional. Even the battery itself, if you lose service as all your other device is gonna lose power too, if you don't have a generator, certainly your phone gets Wi-Fi. And if you can rely on your phone to make calls, it makes sense to have a battery backup, I think. Our phone doesn't get Wi-Fi. We don't have, we're in a hole. No, but over the, so with your cell phone, once you get good Wi-Fi, you can make calls over Wi-Fi with yourself. I got that. Right, I'm just saying, hours out. Oh, yeah, yeah, not hours out, we can't wait. Right, I get it. I'm not, do you lose power with the, do you lose your battery? Because it's glass smart. Um, no, so if you lose power and you have a battery, your broadband would stay up. Okay. Well, so the caveat to that, you are accurate in that, right? You need a battery backup for the ONT. For the ONT. As well as, you know, the router would have to be either A, tied to that battery backup, or if it's in another location, it would need to meet another backup. The battery powers this device, which your phone surface is coming out of, but this device would need some kind of backup. Yes, for your internet. Yes. Good point. One more, okay. Go ahead. What is the life on the cable that you're putting up? This glass pan, how does it stand? I mean, trees land on it, if it's on top of that. I don't know about the longevity, but we're running this fiber on 10 M stainless steel strand, which I'm not sure there are too many trees that are gonna knock that over. That's right. So this is a pole fault with a pole fault. The strand actually wraps around the cable, wraps around the... The strand. Yeah, but the strand holds it up. Okay, that's why there's like two pieces that are strung on the telephone pole. Now, the longevity of the last fiber, it's been... I mean, the first fibers we ever put in are still in the network. Yeah, put the four fiber in up over from Wayne's Field over to the Champlain Valley in 1987, 86, and that four fiber is still running today, and that goes up over the mountain. So yeah, if it gets broke, it's easy to... I won't say it's easy. We place it back together, we fuse it back together and all that, but it doesn't wear and tear like copper, you know? I think back in the heyday when I was younger, I remember down in Springfield, Vermont, they put a copper cable out in the parking lot and a fiber cable out in the parking lot and all the vehicles ran over it, and the copper cable had degraded first over the fiber. Even though it's glass, it's... Squirrels chewing on it? Squirrels like fiber. They do. They do, unfortunately. But they chew copper, too. Yeah, they chew. But well, eventually, you know, we'll get mice-like fiber, so we're not getting our cabinets every once in a while and something will go down and we'll go out there and do. That's far. So many of you have received a postcard with our price schedule. If you didn't, you know, the 100 or 100 is 79. The 500 is 99. Residential, one gigabit over one gigabit is 129, and then residential, two gigabit, which is really using a lot of cabans, it's 199. Now, those are the residential rates. We also have business rates of a slightly higher than these. I don't know how many people are in business here, but they're also on our website, I believe. Yes. Yeah. So, and I had a question that I don't need that I'll answer here because it's not been asked. It's, are there any subsidies? And at the current time, CD5 doesn't have any subsidies to offer. But FCC has a program for low-income families and individuals, $30 a month. And the individual has to apply for that. You have to have service and then apply for it from the FCC. $30 off. $30 off, yeah. Off, not $30. $30 off. No, $30 off. So, you're already on that, how do you transfer it? Have you had experience with that? I have not. That's a good question. I'll have to look into how that, if you've already qualified for ACP, how you've got my very subscribers, it's there's probably a process directly through you, Zach, so. It would be good to get that to you. Good question. We've been here, we need you to make very, so the other thing is for people who have to have long lines and have to get involved with paying for this dog per foot and you have an extra 1,000 feet, we actually will give you a zero interest loan over a few months that would bill you monthly. So, that's another option in terms of that. In the meantime, the state of Vermont is looking into equity and block band and coming up with ways of finding ways to subsidize the low income people of the state. I don't see anything on the near horizon for that, but it's in the requirement to get the next chunk of the infrastructure money that Congress passed two years ago, which Vermont will not see for about another year and a half because of the bureaucracy they're giving out money. And so, we anticipate that there'll be a requirement for some sort of equity for people who sign up. Well, we don't know what that's gonna look like at this point. When can I subscribe? Well, this is now old, oh no, it's correct. See how, see how. I need to. I need to see how I'll do late July, so here it is, late July. We opened up signing up for subscriptions yesterday. Yeah, two days ago. Two days ago, anyway, it's not. If you try and have any difficulty, let us know, right? Right, I wanna hear about it. How do you find out what zone, what area you're in, look on the map and you're in. Yeah, you're in two. We're in two. We're in two, yes. So anybody going, West Calis and Worcester and most of East Montpelier that's in, because each of us have multiple zones, but County Road and East Montpelier to Horn of the Moon is in zone two, so you can sign up. CLO, there is a link from our homepage so that you can get right to the map and take a look at your own address to see if those are close. So that's just a new thing that's come up. On that map, it shows you the area that we, and CLO two, there's a stretch of Elmore Road and Worcester that we have to wait for, we're not empowered to fix the poles. So there is a piece of CLO two that isn't being served right now. And then the other thing is. Just see, come on, we don't own the poles. It's okay, we don't own the poles. We also do not serve off-grid properties. That's the stipulation and the money we got from the state. We, you know, if you have a way of getting to us and underwriting it, great, because we have designed the whole network to serve everybody, even the off-grid locations. The question is, there's no poles, and so pretty much it's an underground solution. So, and then we'll be moving into the rest of Worcester and Milisex later in the year. We were hoping to do Cabot and Marshfield this year. It doesn't look like that's gonna happen. Hopefully we'll get it done, get going on it next, early spring next year. Can I ask sort of a technical question about the cable? So if we see, we've watched the guys putting the cable up around our place, and you know that steel cable, is the somehow the lighted wire in that terminal? No, it's spun around, the cable's attached by spitting. So there's a two-step process. They got the strands, the strand is put up first, and then they have lashing wire that goes around the fiber in the strand. So they got a tool that they pull with a ATV or whatever, but they'll pull that tool and it spins, and it spins the lashing wire around your cable. So there's two wires on the end of the fiber? Yeah. Basically. There's a steel wire, big steel wire that goes between the telephone poles to pull up. And that's what you see go up first, right? That's what goes up first, yeah. And then the black fiber will go on that, and that black fiber is tied to that steel with a lashing wire. And the lashing wire is really thin just wire, and they use like a figure eight, kind of like a Chinese basket, they go right around it, and that's what holds it up. So sometimes that lashing wire will break, and the fiber will drop a little bit, and then we'll have to come back and relash it. But the strand, the big strand, that doesn't break. And how soon after you put the big strand up do you do the second step? You know, it all depends on the cost, you know, in the case you're just working up here, it really depends on what areas that they're running in. And then even beyond that, right, once the mainline fibers up, they have to come back in, the splicers come back in behind that, which also takes time. So it's really a multi-step process. No wonder you've seen those guys around so much. Yeah. And this is a tough area. This is a tough area. It's just because of everything being off-road. Yeah. All are familiar. So this COO2 goes all the way up to, for those from Calis, goes up to Woodbury Mountain Road. And that'll be the end for this zone. And that's all that got both wires on it, ready to go. Well, the ready-to-go piece, right, with a caveat, you know, there's still work in the network that needs to be done, the electrons need to connect with the wire, the testing, so... I always like to put the caveat out there, there's still some critical milestones, right, that needs to be done. Yeah, in fact, the power hasn't gone to the cabinet, right? Any power? Substation, you know? Yeah, after substation. After substation needs power. Yeah. Right now. Wonder, how do you, when you're going across country, when you're going across country from your pole to the house with conduit, how do you deal with the ledge that you and Amir will be crossing all over the place? I like that. Yeah. That happens. That's when the conduits maybe an inch and a half, I don't know. No, we do realize that they try to go in areas when they go, if they see it's all ledge, then they may say. And some of the texts that may call, if you have buried service, they may say, would you mind if we did aerial to the house? If it's feasible. If it's feasible. If there's a pole that they can come off of, they will ask that to save money if they indeed see that you need to put conduit in. But that is, I mean, you should see some of our very jobs, yeah, where we have the directional board. We don't like those bills. Yeah. So is one better than the other? In regards to? Right from the pole to the house. So we prefer aerial just because, A, it's less expensive. It's quicker. Get your service quicker. You can also restore it if there's a cut. Yes, very quick. I mean, fiber does get cut. Obviously, if it's going off road, it's not always a big deal, but rocks move, you know, people dig. But aerial, you know, we prefer aerial. And that's why we ask because we know it can be quicker. But it would be the thick steel cable. No, it would. So it's self-supporting drop. So no, you won't have a strand or anything unless the distance is too far. And then they may have to put up a, that wouldn't be a... But the process we described before was really the mainline cable. The drops is, you know, it's a much thinner material. It's a smaller diameter fiber and it's designed to be self-supporting for, you know, if everything's book distances. Obviously, there's always extenuating circumstances which might mean that you have to run a piece of strand because, right, the poles are too far apart or whatever for the spec of the cable. But our techs look at that when they come out for that pre-installation site survey so they look at all those. And they make special self-supporting droplets that... When you have a two and a half foot diameter maple and you better run that smaller wire by how do you do that to be sure that the odds are good that you're not gonna be back there. Yeah. They work out their directions of how they bring in that drop anyway that best suits it where they hope that there's no damage. And that's not to say it doesn't happen. You put a chain bolt in your tree, you know. We've seen it. Yeah, we've seen. And we've also had homeowners out there on some of these installs that say you want that gone. Let me go in and get my Hustle Corner steel chainsaw in. There you go. It's gone. This is for one, right? Yeah, this is for one, where all the farmers had this going out through their fields and it's now trees that big. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Exactly. That's why I haven't asked them. Yeah, now those are valid points. Who has a question? I just got a question. So this is the relationship. So somebody comes out and talks to us and say we are going to keep our phone and our TV because you don't do TV. We'll come ask, but we're gonna go with you. We'll interact. If later we wanna go through a telephone can you do that or do you have to do it right away? Also, who works with the other company? Like to get off the internet from them. So you would have to cancel your service with Comcast? Yeah, that would be something that you would have to do. We, if we get out there and Comcast has got their drop pulled through the conduit, we will not pull that out. But if you cancel your service and you pulled it out, we could use that to pull our fiber through. That has happened. We, as far as phone service anytime you want, once your service is in with broadband and you wanted phone, you can order it anytime you want. If the tech needs to come out, I think they may do a trip charge. If they had to do some wiring or anything like that. Or they could say go ahead and plug a phone into the back of the ONT when your services should be there. So there are at least, I know of three internet television services that have all the channels. Is Direct TV, not the satellite one. The YouTube TV. Sling has everything but the locals. Which one? Sling has everything but nothing TV. And they range from, you know, they're in the 50 to 80 dollar range. I mean, they're not that cheap, but it's cheaper than a TV package from Comcast. And you can cancel when you start. And they're streaming. And you can cancel when you start. Yeah. And you want to see how they work. Yeah, there's no contract fees. Yeah. Yeah, no, the same thing with consolidated. I mean, I don't know what kind of contracts they have but you either have to cancel it or let it expire before you sign up. What they have up here is what the steps for signing up are. You need to go to a website. And if you can't get to a website, call the ads, yeah. And choose the package to meet your needs. So they're all on the thing. You click and put them into a shopping cart just like Amazon. And they agree to the terms of service. And the technician comes out and doesn't visit. That's what we've just been talking about. And after you're signed up and agreed, they'll come up and do the installation. And at the same time, whether the Wi-Fi in your house is adequate or not. That's up to you. I'm asking that question again. A few months ago you said that service would come to East Cal's Village around July. Yeah. So now, what do you say? It wasn't raining. No, no. It's gonna be at least a year from July, right? Yeah. And you're gonna have money in November? That's a good question. We're gonna finish the CL01, the Green Mountain Power Footsteps. Yeah, I think we'll finish CL01. I'll put it right on the record for that answer. CL01, CL02, CL03, RSO1 and RSO2 are budgeted for what we have. So when the Green Mountain Power finishes and we put our conduit down to 14, we'll get to the village and to your poor road. I mean, CL02, West Cal's. When do you think it'll be built out? Oh, by the way, I signed up this morning. Yeah. There's no... What do you think? You used to say we finish this CL02. The Cal's portion. Well, we can't light it up until they're all finished. I'm just thinking about getting it all slung up. CL02, they're telling us is the end of September. But we don't really know for sure. We have to splice everything out when we have to get the release of the gas bills. So there's certain proof. So they can't do their thing until we use the finishes that's dropped. Sorry, another hand up tonight. We got a email saying that our address was okay. I will be pleased to register. So I wanted to register, and they said, well, you're already registered. So I tried to register again and it wouldn't let me down as well. Are you ready to register? No problem. All other questions do we need to call this phone number to make an appointment and how can we be sure we're registered or not registered? We are working on the descriptions because there's been lots of confusion on the word register, okay? So when you come to it and it says, this address has already registered, it means you've signed up for notifications, but you haven't signed up for service. So you have to come back when you are zoned, CLL one and CLL two are now live zones for signing up for service. And you have to go through the registration process all over again. So you type in your name and address all over again. And you type in your address all over again and it comes through and it actually puts you into a shopping cart where you can select the type of service that David was talking about. The 100, 500, one gig, two gigs will be on the page and you can see them and select them and put them in the shopping cart. I'll try again, I wouldn't let me go further but I'll go up to her again. What zone are you in, do you know? I don't know, I'll give you two. She's in one. Yeah, you're with them. Adjournment? She's up the road. Yeah. She's in one. One. So that just got over done. You'd like to try it, we can try it over here after. Yeah, that'd be good. That'd be good. I believe it is. Super. This is zone one. This is zone one. This goes from here, from Kent Museum to North Calus. Yeah, I'm on Jack Kales. Oh yeah, you're in zone one. Lighting Ridge is in zone one. Most of the light, no, Lighting Ridge is on zone one, in zone one. She's not in. Who? Yeah, I just want to ask, when do we put gel consolidated that we're done? What's your fibers? One, two. We better let her. Once a technician is leaving, you're happy. Don't do it until your technician says you're out. Yeah. That's when you're pretty happy to show a fan. When you sign up, there'll be a delay between, I see, when you register for it or sign up or put it in the shopping cart on the website. There'll be a delay because the service guy's got to come out and look at it and check your site and give you an estimate if there's any additional charges. You want to say yes, no, I want to continue. Then somebody comes out and actually makes all the connections, but you don't get billed until you actually have live service in your house. I see. It'll be a preliminary visit and then a. An installation visit. Yeah, that's right. You're going to try to include all the taxes and. No, no. Do we know what that's going to be? Do we know what the, we don't have an exact amount. Do we have like an estimate for, say, $79.00? Yeah, yeah, I mean, we need to. Yeah, we need to. I don't want to. We don't have to. Yeah, it's not, I mean, it's. It's not, it's exactly. Is it less than $10.00? Oh, yeah. Okay. For what? Taxes. So we just, we just passed through, right? What is mandated by the state and federal government, but. So you get a call after you sign up or you sign up, have to sign. I mean, do you have to sign up to get a call? You have to sign up. You have to try to get a call. Okay. You have to get the internet service. You can't just register. You have to actually select a service. You get the call. You have to try what they're going to call you. And then you will call us. And by the time you're on the screen. Once you have signed up and then you want the service or along with somebody to contact you. It depends on where you're at, right? And where the network build is, is the big thing. It's 211. It's 211. We're working those right now. And Ralph signed up really early. It's a simpletons question. But I'm curious why Linda and I don't know if Sandy are concerned about having Wi-Fi throughout the house. Is there an exposure machine? We aren't concerned about it. I have a vision to learn about that. Yeah. Is there some sort of like radiation or carcinogenic? Well, it's radio waves. If you're using a cell phone, I don't worry about it. Yeah. I don't worry about it. So there you go. So I actually have covered most of my slides. The one thing I wanted to talk about was this came from my wife who can't tell the difference between Wi-Fi and cell service. And so I thought I would explain that Wi-Fi is not cellular service. But if you have Wi-Fi, your cell phone will work. And so since nobody in Calis has cell service, you more than likely will be used Wi-Fi calling on your phone. And so you will have cell service, but it's not cell service. So I just want to make sure you understand that one. You have to, you know, I don't know if every phone has it, but you have to go to your settings and search for Wi-Fi calling and just slide out a slide of our phone. And it should work. I've been using it for, I don't know, five years, seven years, a long time. Thank God for that. Actually, it was in the interest of the cell companies to do that because they don't have to share the bandwidth on there. It's a lot of work on us. But I think that's my last thing that I wanted to talk about. On our website, we have a complete list of all the TV options you can look at and, you know, decide if you want to not sign up with Comcast for that. But the other one is, aside from just signing up for a regular phone service from Waittsville, you can actually use the internet for voiceover internet protocol using a third party system call. I use UMA, O-O-M-A. It's five couples a month. And I've had it for, like, 10 years. The other one is Vonage. And I believe there's a third one out there that's popular. There's lots of, yeah. Anyway, so there are other options out there. What I like about UMA is that I get, if I'm not there on the phone rings, it sends me the voicemail to my email. And it's a pretty nice service. So those are my... So that means instead of having the phone service drive you through you, you could get this other kind of phone service? If you want, yeah. You'd have to be a little bit of a geek. Yeah. Yeah. So you are. Okay. Now, I gotta say, I think I paid $5 a month for that. Okay. Yeah. When you go to look up the app and you got 100 over 100, it won't take you very long to get at it. You won't have to sit there and watch it. And you can change it. You can port your current phone number to the services too. Yeah. And you have this list on the website? I think it's on the website. We have a frequently asked question page on the website. And we'll keep on adding information to that as a result of meetings like this. Because I think we've had at least five questions that we don't have answers for on a frequently asked question page. And our pupper over there is in the corner if she's taking a few notes. Taking a few notes. That's a frequently asked page. Take a few notes. That's a frequently asked page. Are there any other questions? I know it's been painful for you. It's been painful for us. Point. Okay. Going back to the beginning of your presentation, you talked about the money that had come from the feds and the status of your build-outs, the different zones. Is there money to complete the work to do the services to it? No. We're in the process of writing, looking for a lean alum right now. We're also looking at private capital to borrow. And we will be going to the bond bank probably next year to complete the work. Also, we just issued $229 million to Vermont. So we don't know what piece of the pie we're gonna get for that. But because we are Vermont CUD, we expect that by first quarter of 2025 we will have that. So it's a long, I mean that money, I mean that the lobbyist tied that money up so well that the process that once we apply for a grant, it can be challenged by anybody and however long that process takes. And then, so we don't expect to see any of that 229 million until the first quarter of 2025. But in the meantime, we'll be borrowing money to continue. We do not want to stop building. That'd be the worst. So it's, yeah. Like I said, I mean, Cal us alone was $6 million, I believe. So it's not cheap. And also subscriptions will have us support. Yeah, the money coming in actually having operating money for change as opposed to just the money going out. And that $6 million is just the main line construction, right? That doesn't include any of the drops or electronics. I say Cal us when I really meant CLO one. Is there an installation fee? $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99, $99. Sorry, I'm late to the party. That's okay. I'm just wondering, have you guys already run the lines in Cal us yet or? Yeah. Okay. Well, you missed the slide that shows the five zones in Cal us. So depending where you live in Cal us, two zones are now open. Okay. The third, fourth and fifth next year in the early years. Yeah, I'm on Ballantyne Road. Oh, you're on Ballantyne Road. You're that guy. Yeah. Yes. Another one. Why don't you take this phone call? No. No. He's in the position of a hybrid collector not fixing the poles for us. Oh, okay. So we're waiting, they're planning on doing it. Okay. I saw them surveying their CV5 or something. Oh, yes, it's coming. Yeah, no, we need a hybrid collector doing something. Okay. We don't own the poles. Yeah. Right. And we pay them $11 a year per pole. Oh, I see. Plus the cost of fixing the pole. That's about $8,000 a new pole. We already paid them. Yeah, we paid them. We already paid them. And they have fixed them, yeah. But anyway, if you know anybody in Harvard, yellow. Yeah. So when is the service itself actually going to be available? In seal the one which you're in, which if Harvard could finish, you're probably next month. Okay. Great. We need those poles on. Yeah. So that one will be delayed. Yes. So tell a big picture of questions but the first one is do you feel this is going to be sustainable and growing and financially supported? Because I know, he's popular, you're in Calisthen, Woodbury, Woodbridge. We're not big towns. We're not a lot failure. You know, which I'm sure has a zillion different cable companies going through it. But the physical network itself is very resilient and lasts a long time. So there's lower maintenance costs for fiber. And so once we get it up there, we expect it to last. And then if somebody asked the question, how long does it last? And the answer is we don't really know. But we think 30 to 50 years, probably. And then sustaining it, so sustaining it is affordable because it is so resilient. But there is an expectation that it'll be a sustainable system. Financially sustainable, the model we ran is based on 40% of people taking the service. So I think that's the other part of your question. Right. I'm sure you're like, okay. So my concern right now on that number is I think for CL01, which the majority of people in this zone have DSL, we're probably gonna get higher than 40%. So it won't be an indicator of what happens in CL02 when there's a lot of Comcast. And then just on that other piece, I mean, TV Fiber, I think made a fantastic decision to partner with a third generation family, a 119 year old company. Right. So we've been here since long, long time ago. Talk about that a little bit. Who is the company and what's... Sure. Wakefield and Champlain Valley Telecom were a third generation family owned company. We've been operating here in Vermont, starting obviously in Wakefield, Lauren and we're down in Fasen. But we've been operating there for 119 years now, same family. In 1994, we purchased the GTE property. It was Contel GTE in the Champlain Valley region and that tripled the size of our company. We're now partnered with CB Fiber as well as two other communications union districts, Maple Broadband and NAK Broadband to help with doing what we've been doing for 119 years. And that's bringing telecom services to rural communities throughout Vermont. So the other question I get asked is, can they handle the growth? It's been challenging. But yeah, we're up to the battle and we're hiring. If you have any young folks that are interested in getting into the telecom business. But the only thing you know that the maintenance on Fiber is a lot less than the top. It's a lot less, but trees do come down. It does take stuff down. We have maintenance contracts with people that take care of it. Yeah, we've been doing it a long time. We know what we're doing. Are you related at all to consolidating? No, we're not. We keep getting different stories from that. Consolidated is a publicly traded company, right? That's the old Fairpoint assets that became. Oh, come right. See, yeah, and now they're trying to rebrand as Vidium Fiber, right, in that mistake. It'll come back. These have been great questions. Really great questions. John, you did not speak. My mother's just, how is the relationship with work good? Fantastic. I mean, they, since they initiated back in about 1935 or whatever, they know every swamp, ridge, ledge, blah, blah, you know. I had a last Thursday, I was driving on County Road, opposite Rick Hopkins' house. They're in the swamp with Rick Hopkins' canoe. Fiber up in the holes. I don't know why. That's awesome. So, where did work with this context? Where did all its make-grade work faster than we could construct? They were phenomenal. But then you had your workers doing the steel cable. So, the mainline cable's actually being done by another Vermont company. You used this, that you've probably seen, yeah. They partnered with several different companies to get this done. Right. And where can I actually hide some private contractors due to the polls they had requested of transmission polls? Because it requires a really big skill. Yeah, totally. So, they did that. Because. Yeah. Yeah, they've been fabulous. No big questions. One at a time. So, the actual co-wide date is somewhat in August. First and foremost, CL2, when you are a man, it's probably September. September. Yeah. We got a few connections. But you'll do all of the initial stuff before then. That's co-wide. Yeah. Yeah, that's a co-wide date. You've got to have how you can say sign up. You can sign up now. OK. You can sign up now. If you're in CL01 or 2, you can sign up now. Well, as far as the IP address thing, are you going to be handing out public IP addresses? I guess. OK. Yeah. So, it's a single IP address that gets assigned to the router that's not behind the gateway. Yeah. But if it was a public, yeah, it's not a public IP address. We can sell static IP addresses. Static IPs at P2s. It's on the internet as an add-on. Yeah. But we're not doing carry-grade NAT, if that's all the way. Which is what a lot of cell phone companies do. Yeah. Absolutely. That's what others do. All right, great. I'm sure. All right. Thank you for all of you there. But we do have drinks and snacks.