 The people in the small communities of Western Massachusetts have been struggling for years now to join the rest of the Commonwealth and the rest of the country in having access to high-speed internet service, broadband we call it, and this service is really become quite a necessity for people. If you need to do computer work either for school or for your job, or if you want to look up a recipe or you want to read newspapers online, you want to do research online, using dial-up as is the case in so many of our small communities really takes an enormous amount of time and patience and it's just not fair to those people not to have access to the most modern of technology because they then fall behind and their communities fall behind other places and so we in Western Massachusetts and the legislative delegation have been working for close to eight years now to try to bring high-speed internet into every home in Western Massachusetts and they were about 34 communities that had absolutely no access and dozens of additional communities where you had large pockets of people who had no access. Well happily after trying to work with Verizon and some of the other providers over time we finally got at least Verizon to commit some resources, $20 million a couple of years ago to bring high-speed internet into pockets of some of the communities that were totally unserved and improved service in some of the communities that were only partially served but that still left lots of people uncovered and a couple of years ago with the help of Governor Patrick and with the Western Massachusetts legislative delegation joining forces with some people in Blackstone Valley in Worcester County area and even some people out on the Cape that were trying to still get access we were able to secure passage of a piece of legislation to provide $40 million in funding to help solve this problem and we also formed the Massachusetts Broadband Institute which was a state quasi-public agency that would receive this money and work with communities and providers to seek universal coverage here in Massachusetts. Happily the federal government also a couple of years ago announced that they were going to provide some funding for this very same problem and so Massachusetts has now applied twice the first time the project for Western Massachusetts was not funded but happily the second time it was funded and so now between state funds and federal funds we have 72 million dollars that are being deployed right now to bring a high-speed internet into Western Massachusetts in those communities that receive little or no service and what this involves is erecting 30,000 telephone poles or utility poles on which they can hang wires and it's called the middle mile project and basically we're going to bring the wires and the poles to all parts of Western Massachusetts that require it in order to get access even as the Mass Broadband Institute and the communities around Western Mass are working with the local communities to come up with deals, configurations, various approaches that the private providers will be able to tap into and be able to provide the service. One of the major projects going on in the region is really homegrown it's called Wired West and through that dozens of communities are voting in their local town meetings to join Wired West. Wired West's goal is to create a totally locally controlled distribution network and system that can tie into that middle mile project and be able to deliver services at an affordable rate to people in the communities in Western Massachusetts who are now either not served or underserved. So we have a couple more years of work yet ahead of us 2014 is the target year for us to have everybody covered in one way or another either through cell service, through wire service, through Wired West or through other private providers. So we are finally making significant progress and we're hopeful that soon all of the residents of Western Massachusetts and all of the communities of Western Massachusetts will have access to the high-speed internet that they need in order to be effective in their employment, to serve their friends and neighbors, to serve their communities and for the children to have that kind of support and service for their education.