 That's for 59. We'll get started in one minute here. Are we live? Yep. We are. You can turn off your video now Harley to save bandwidth if you need to. Okay. Can I start recording? Not yet. All right. Now you can start recording. Hello. My name is Hunter Thompson. I'm the director of telecommunications with public service department. We are here at the third public input session for the public comment draft of the 2024 10 year telecom plan. So as a brief overview this meeting how this meeting will go is that we will get started. Alex will briefly go over a slide deck which describes the 2024 10 year telecom plan and then we will open up the session for public comment. Just as a reminder this session is to solicit comment and is not necessarily a conversational piece so we will take all the comments we get whether verbal or written and respond to them in the final draft of the 2024 10 year telecom plan. Just so folks know at 5 o'clock recording was started on this meeting. So you are being recorded. And I think with that we can get started if you're all set Alex. And thank you for calling again. It's appreciated. All good. No problem. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes. Great. So thank you Hunter. My name is Alex Kelly. I lead the broadband team at rural innovation strategies Inc. We're one of the contractors who've been helping the public service department with this plan. Just as a reminder this presentation is not a note for note rendition of the plan. The plan is quite lengthy and detailed so this presentation is simply meant to draw people's memories or help frame the conversation but encourage anyone who wants to make a comment to refer to the original text for specifics if you have questions. Another note before we begin is that if you have your comments in writing please do submit those in writing as well because that will help us with the transcript that we're producing at the same time. Harley you can go to the next slide. So I'm going to start by giving a little context about the 2024 plan why this plan is different what the landscape is that this plan has been created in response to I'm then going to go into some of the research and analysis that was done to support the plan the findings recommendations then I'll review some of the findings and recommendations in the categories listed on the screen so findings and recommendations about wire line coverage my wireless coverage affordability public safety and Vermont statute. So the 10 year plan as it is every year is guided by two pieces of stat is guided by multiple pieces of statute. Primarily it is created to advance the telecommunications goals listed in 30 vs 8 202 C and it is also created using a process that's established by statute that can be found in 202 D. At this moment in time the state of Vermont has had access to significant federal resources for connectivity and in particular last mile broadband deployment. That's through the American Rescue Plan Act capital projects fund and now be the broadband equity access and deployment resources. Those resources are attached to a federal planning process dictated by federal statute and operationalized by the NTIA that has meant that in parallel to the creation of this plan the Vermont Community Broadband Board has been leading a simultaneous plan that to lay out how those resources will be applied to last mile broadband. Because of all that work happening in parallel and because this plan can't supersede that federally required plan in certain areas this plan that I'm about to talk about addresses all the statutory requirements but places a special focus on some of the elements that are not being addressed simultaneously by that work happening over at the Vermont Community Broadband Board. Next slide please. Great. So here is a summary of some of the qualitative and quantitative research that underpins the plan. First of all we did a phone survey both landline and cellular phone numbers of a statistically significant sampling of residents. Some of the results of that phone survey are sprinkled into this presentation but I encourage people to look at the results in its entirety in the actual document. We also did online surveys of Vermont businesses, healthcare professionals and public safety professionals. We did interviews with over 55 public and private stakeholders and we did a statewide mobile engineering, mobile wireless engineering and coverage analysis to look at where are the gaps in mobile broadband, how have they changed over time, what will it take to close them moving forward and we also did use an input output methodology to assess the gaps in our current broadband construction workforce. This basically is an analysis of based on the anticipated level of spending that will need to happen in the state to build all the broadband we want to build, what does the workforce, how does the workforce need to grow in order to meet the construction demand? Great. First of all addressing fiber coverage. I think this is probably obvious to everyone on listening in. The fiber coverage is expanding rapidly as we speak in all corners of the state. Nevertheless through our conversations and analysis we did identify some small challenges that includes some of the challenges listed on the slide. But just to kind of go over the statistics, the houses with access to 100 meg symmetrical, more than doubled between 21 and 23. And as everyone knows Vermont's goal is to pass all on-grid premises with 100 over 100 service. And at this point in time Vermont is on track to meet that goal by 2029. We also found that Vermont needs to grow its broadband construction workforce. That sector shrunk between 2018 and 2022 is right before all this construction kicked off due to kind of natural contractions in the industry and certain technological advancements that allowed these ISPs to operate with fewer workers. Anyways long story short if we need to build $700 million of fiber deployments over the next five years that will require growing our workforce by about 750 workers. Now a lot of those workers are in the direct installation roles, line workers and so forth. But our analysis encompasses the top 12 occupations that need to apply themselves to broadband construction projects. So another finding is that as part of utility hardening exercises a number of fiber infrastructure owners may need to bury portions of their network within the next 10 to 15 years. And infrastructure owners are not as clear as they would like to be on how that will be operationalized, who pays for what. And that information is important to be looking at now because the business plans and the viability of entities receiving grant money now need to have those costs and responsibilities incorporated into their business plans now because of how utility business plans work in order for us to be very clear and confident with how we are building our networks. Another finding is that the agency of transportation which was issuing right of way permit waivers for a number of years has recently stopped doing that. And what that essentially does is it increases the cost of deployment and unserved areas with those extra permitting fees for people who are bringing broadband to the very financially difficult to reach places that are very rural in our state. So in the mobile wireless department, you know, stakeholders were very adamant and very vocal about how critical that service is across a number of sectors and usage. And our, I think that the headline is that our analysis found that coverage has not expanded very much over the past five years. And that's based on comparisons of drive tests in 2018 and 2022, I believe it was. So digging into the details here, 80 percent of businesses surveyed indicated that permissible wireless coverage is inadequate for their business needs for a number of reasons related to how they need to communicate with their employees to how their customers find them and how their customers communicate with business. 64 percent of people surveyed in our phone survey strong agreed that the state should use public funds to improve mobile wireless coverage. So a clear majority there. We also found that even though coverage has not expanded much, minimal improvements in the actual geographic area that is covered by mobile wireless download speeds have increased by quite a bit. And that's due to technology upgrades primarily. And if you look at the state as a whole, approximately 412 miles of road do not have mobile broadband coverage from any provider. So looking at all the all the providers that were included in the road test. Lastly, and this is a really important piece, our engineering analysis showed that, you know, if you look at all on serve places, tackling the easiest to serve areas without wireless coverage can be done very efficiently with what we are calling small wireless facilities. So a traditional tower, a cell phone tower, you might say, is usually around 140 feet. Small wireless facilities that are 50 feet essentially placed very strategically can be an efficient way to close the easiest half of our broadband, mobile wireless broadband gaps. Especially with increasing fiber presence across the state. Now, you still need, you may need those big towers to efficiently close the hardest 50%, but due to our topography and actually due to the curvature of the earth and the way that coverage, you know, you get more incremental gains the higher you get at a certain point. Our analysis showed that these small wireless facilities can actually efficiently close the easiest to close mobile wireless gaps. So affordability is a big concern in the state. Many, many stakeholders wanted to talk about that with us and one of the big things on everyone's mind is that the affordable connectivity program known as the ACP, which is a $30 a month subsidy provided by the federal government, is expiring and it looks to be expiring next month at the end of April according to predictions of when that funding is going to run out. So that program also importantly only offers a subsidy for either mobile or fixed service, but not both. So once that expires approximately 24,000 Vermont households are going to lose that $30 a month subsidy that's helping them with their connectivity bills. There's some interesting crosstabs about who in particular that impacts, but you know as a whole 24,000 low income Vermont households are going to have a harder time paying for their broadband after April. And just as an example of of the importance of continuous connectivity, health care workers in particular spoke very eloquently about how important mobile coverage is that's both available and affordable to unhoused Vermonters because that is a lifeline to services and it's the by far the best way and most reliable way for service providers like health care workers to be able to contact their clients and make sure they're knowing their appointments are nowhere to go are on time and just their connection to care really relies on mobile coverage and access to a device. So in the public safety realm there was a lot of ink used in the plan to discuss the potential to consolidate public safety answering points and this was because various legislators have been discussing this idea so we spent a good amount of time talking about the advantages and disadvantages to taking that approach. In across New England, some states have have consolidated their PSAPs to some degree, some states have not. The advantage is include you know well first of all potential long-term cost savings which is one of I think the primary drivers of wanting to consider this but there's some staffing flexibility benefits there's different ways you improve coverage 24-7 with that consolidation there might be more resources for statewide emergencies as well but there are also some challenges or potentially disadvantages to this so there's different governance systems and processes that you need to implement there's a upfront cost to that system migration that you would need to understand and cover. There's different issues with you know centralizing things means that you don't have as many people from different corners of the state answering calls and of course you just as part of new systems you need new resiliency and new failover processes as you establish those new a new framework there. So other than that you know most public safety stakeholders cited funding as some of the primary barriers to completing their goals for example the goals in statewide communication interoperability plan and then we also took like a first net and according to our conversations and analysis there have been 50 first net sites deployed and first net is the program with AT&T that provides dedicated network access to public safety and first responders. You know some of those 50 sites have been new builds many of them have been upgrades with new technology to existing tower sites so despite the 50 first net sites in the state it is well worth noting that only five percent of public safety survey responders reported never losing mobile service in the job so clearly we have a long way to go. Lastly on the next slide Harley we at the request of the JITOC committee we did an analysis of some of the statutes governing telecommunications and our conclusion is that they could be more specific and better aligned with current state strategy in a few critical areas number one you know broadband speed definitions and minimum deployment parameters are starting to lag behind their states and they're not fully aligned across different elements of statute. Another example that we call it on the plan is that the statutorily mandated end date for the community broadband board is likely to occur before all of the B program activities will be completed and again they're overseeing the B program in the state especially some of the enforcement and auditing that needs to happen after construction is over to make sure everyone built exactly where they said they were going to build and are offering the services that they said they were going to offer and so forth. And then in general the statutory goals some of which were drafted almost 40 years ago containing overlapping and non-specific language that at this point given the telecommunications landscape and the strategies the state is taking on could be much more refined to really make sure that all telecommunications stakeholders are aligned and rowing in the same direction as they do their work. Moving on to the next slide sorry Harley can you um pop over to the next slide. Oh great awesome. So um you know again I'm going to go through the same categories that I went through when talking about our analysis and findings. So first to talk a little bit about wireline deployment as I mentioned it's ongoing there are very specific rules and parameters that the state needs to follow dictated by the their attachments riding on the funding that we received from the federal government from the NTIA. However there's a couple things in here that we noted that could make those deployments easier. First of all if the agency of transportation would reinstate their permit fee waivers at least until the state achieves its goal of 100 over 100 meg symmetrical broadband that would alleviate a cost that the entities trying to build broadband in the hardest to serve areas and most expensive areas would have to pay. So that seems like an easy lift to make things better and more achievable. Number two I mentioned the need to grow the broadband construction workforce by about 750 workers across a number of job categories. Vermont has some training programs they've implemented with a number of entities in collaborative working collaboration but we encourage those entities and recommend that those entities really work as hard as they can to scale those programs to the scale of to the size of workforce that we need. And so as I mentioned 750 jobs across a number of categories and given the challenges of broadband the broadband trades essentially you often need to set a goal to recruit three times as many workers in those categories as you think you need because of the natural turnover that happens in the industry it's hard work after all and retirements and so forth. So our recommendation is to aim high with that. And then lastly on this point about the possibility that infrastructure owners will need to pay for the burying of their infrastructure in the next 10-15 years. The state of Vermont and particularly the VCBB is in a good position to lead a study that works towards resolution on that front and so what this would involve is documenting and understanding the process that's going to happen, who's going to pay for what, the potential impact to the financials of all the entities who own fiber, but more importantly providing a kind of centralized view of opportunities for saving and alignment. And so how do you align the work that needs to happen on the telecommunication side with the electric infrastructure side to try to create as frictionless and efficient of a process of doing that as possible. So on the mobile wireless side our recommendation, a primary recommendation centers around implementing what we're calling a small facilities wireless grant program. We think you and we think the state should implement it in a kind of pilot phase at first for some reasons that I will get into. So this grant program would provide grants for the deployment of again small wireless facilities and these are the ones that we believe are equally if not more efficient from a financial standpoint to closing the easiest 50 percent of coverage gaps to close and they also preserve the landscape and the aesthetic by being less intrusive smaller right you can nestle them into the hillside and they don't they're not as noticeable an element in the landscape. So we think two to three million dollars is the right amount for initial pilot program and in the plan we provided a list of data that we think the state should collect as part of this pilot program in order to then refine that work moving forward and data includes everything from you know costs broken down by different category to you know what partnerships are coming together where to where you know where are the most viable places to build where you get applications who's applying and so all of this will help the state refine this program and do better in the future. So the second big recommendation in this category because we made some recommendations around the state's data collection practices which we think if the state were able to make these changes it will strengthen the planning abilities while at the same time helping them better measure and track progress against our goal of increasing the mobile coverage in the state. So the drive test in 2018 versus 2022 was done using a different methodology obviously we're recommending repeating the 2022 methodology so that you have exactly the same data to compare it to do the drive test every two years. We laid out a number of very specific parameters for what a crowdsource drive test would look like especially if the state would like to be able to collect data for all roads not just the primary roads that the drive test covers. Another element to this is we think the state should request that 248a permit recipients notify the public service department when they complete their tower builds because at this point it is not always obvious or clear to the state if those permit permitees I guess if and when they execute on the permit they've obtained. On the affordability front we are recommending that the state first of all you know work on affordability for both wire line and wireless wireless service. So whereas the federal ACP program was one or the other element based on all of our stakeholder interviews and really profound contributions across the public and private sector we we are very sure that Vermont stakeholders see these two types of services as equally important and so acknowledging that importance means working on affordability for both at once rather than one or the other. Our recommendation for a benchmark and a way to measure is that we believe that two percent of monthly income should be the definition of affordable for low income for monitors we've got kind of charts and documentation in the plan about what that actually means but ultimately we think a state runs based on the typical cost of those services and our benchmark for affordability we think that a state runs subsidy program that provides 67 dollars a month to low income for monitors again for both of those services is the right level to address the affordability concern for both types of subscriptions. And then lastly as an auxiliary piece to that especially for unhoused Vermonters and the the importance of continuous access to mobile coverage we think that the state should establish a program to provide fully subsidized devices and subscriptions to those Vermonters and work through human services providers just again to ensure that everyone who everyone who doesn't have a home in Vermont has continuous access to services. So on the on the emergency communication systems front you know I think the state our recommendation is that the state really take a look at what elements of our communications needs are available uh have have federal grants available to support them and what don't and it is a funding barrier as I mentioned to a number of the goals in the statewide communications interoperability plan so so you know that's one of our primary recommendations on that front but I think the again the kind of marquee piece in this plan on the emergency communications front is about the possibility of consolidating public safety answering points and so I think that the the plan says that if as all the stakeholders read and absorb the analysis we provided in the plan if this still remains a consideration that the state wants to pursue again some peer states have done it some have not there's trade-offs in both directions right the next step is to actually create a consolidation plan and that plan should have a specific cost of consolidation in Vermont's particular context weighed against the long-term savings and that is a large undertaking this recommendation is not made lightly because it is a big lift but that would be the next step if the state's stakeholders who read our analysis of the advantages and disadvantages believe that that it is appropriate to move forward with that in the state of Vermont right on the statutory front you know I think this is an anticipated recommendation at least that the legislature who knows that the statutes need to be revisited but a summary of this recommendation is that the state should modernize the statutes that guide our telecommunications policies and practices and there's a few ways in which statutory goals in different sections need to be made more specific again they're overlapping and unspecific we can make them more specific they should be aligned with x71 and speed tiers and everything else across all of our telecommunication statutes should be cohesive we do recommend extending the Vermont community broadband board sunset date so that they can provide adequate oversight and monitoring of the deployments and we also are recommending that the legislators take a look at the statutory goals and take a look at our on our deployment strategies and make sure we are creating goals and deployment strategies in concert you know one example we are spending significant resources as we should be to ensure that in the most rural areas of the state everyone has access to a fiber provider at 100 over 100 megs those are very very difficult places to serve with even one provider and so you know there's a state goal of increasing competition in the state which is an appropriate goal but what that goal is getting at is that we would like some of the byproducts of competition better speeds lower service better customer service those are benefits and values that can but don't always arrive in under a competitive environment but that's really what we're driving for and so we are recommending our our hypothesis or what we're laying forth for the legislature is do you want to be setting a goal of competition for competition's sake which again gets very very expensive when you there isn't even enough economic base to support one provider much less multiple or are what you actually care about some of these by things that are potential byproducts of competition and if so is that a better is that a better framework for the goal and so we're just prompting the legislature to think about some of these questions as they iterate on and modernize the the statutes which again should reflect the legislature's goals for the state thank you all very much and I believe now we are going to go into public comments and if you could please keep your comments um civil and uh and start with three minutes till we get everyone and then we may come back to you if there's more time that would be great great thank you alex so as alex said we'll open the meeting to public comments we'll start with anyone on the phone have a comment if not we will go to the room can you see whether they're muted or they're trying to talk they can unmute and or erase their hand oh you don't have to do that no we don't have to do that um doesn't look like we have anyone on the phone so mr. Whitaker uh Steve Whitaker from Montpelier I'm a bit dumbfounded that even after having provided the information a week ago about the department of public safety and the public safety communications task force efforts that this presentation uh is still so misguided specifically regarded regarding the consolidation of peace apps I'm gonna cover a number of points here and I'll probably run over three minutes so if you notice anybody else jump on I'll take a pause thank you uh statute is statute 202 c and d in title 30 are not uh to be wished away because we're trying to get away with writing half a plan or impose a new ideology on Vermonters so I found your transcript kind of useless um so statute is statute act 71 is not a binding factor on or it's not a notwithstanding clause that allows you to violate 202 d with regard to how you go about this plan uh if you've you can't even the department and the telecommunications division cannot abdicate its responsibility to make sure 202 d is adhered to strictly even though you've signed a $400,000 contract with reese which I consider snake oil they they failed us last time they'll they're failing us this time and we need to put a stop to it every prerequisite as laid out in 202 d must be met before the plan is prepared and these hearings are held I pointed out to you a handful of prerequisites that have not been met I see uh hunter nodding in agreement um every element such as public participation an effective public participation process must be met coordination with the access media organizations must be met it are you not at all suspicious that only one person showed up last Monday and only one person appears to be here tonight that you haven't met your basic threshold of an effective public participation process and you must address every element set in the goals and policies of 202c those aren't optional where it says shall support competitive choice for consumers shall support open access for competitors these are not things you can let your contractor try to wish away and write a plan that dodges them and pretends we're going to just get lower costs and and higher service by wishing it were so that's uh delusional thinking statute actually says that we'll have 100 100 by 2024 and yet the failure to write a plan over the last decade has left us in the place where we still don't have a plan to get it done by the end of this year so our fiber strategy is fundamentally flawed and yet it's also been left out of the plant this draft uh the cods aren't even happy with this draft because you're it's all focused on you know wireless and and other priorities that don't address the merits or the guidance or the retuning of the fiber strategy in recent since this program was initiated build costs have increased dramatically as has have labor costs as has the cost of money uh additionally the CUDs have not built the right-of-way charges into their economic models so you're headed towards a whole bunch of bankrupt CUDs and a whole bunch of fiber getting sold to the highest bidder which might be you know consolidated or Comcast that would be a supreme disaster and yet y'all are keep supporting this keeping of unnecessary secrets of the financial models this keeps dying out or is that a the screen keeps going black i don't know why i watch the screen now uh only if you can read sign language uh the secret financial models will not lead to affordable broadband we need a network design over overall the whole state and this was defeated by the language was put in act 71 to allow a unified statewide resilient engineered fiber design and the broadband board ignored it and proceeded with this hodge podge of different strategies of non uh of not network architectures that don't support competition that don't support fail over in resilience so we need a remotely reconfigurable we could have and should have built on the velco architecture and required every cd to buy a compatible remote add drop multiplexer that can be even managed by velco and keep and reroute around fiber breaks during big storms all from a single console in ruttland i mean that would have been the most affordable way to go about this put the backhaul trunking in in place on an existing networks we need to be using first lights fiber cci's fiber we have open access conditions on some of first lights fiber because we granted the money to sovereign that in the beginning that has never been a lab elaborated or elucidated in the plan exactly where do we have what rights of access at what cost to sovereign that's fiber that we paid for under the b-top program similarly with consolidated communications as a condition of a service quality investigation they accepted the millions from the fcc and they built the interoffice fiber to the remote terminals we should have open access to that fiber too before they get another incentive rate plan approved and this same firm recommended oh don't tie open access fiber to your incentive rate plans that's the only lever we have with regards to incentive reg plans is the teeth in this telecommunications plan i would encourage you to get familiar with 226 b in title 30 and understand that this plan's most effective statutory leverage is in no incentive reg plan can be adopted or approved by the public utilities commission if it's not found to be consistent with this plan so that's a way that we could have and should have implemented open access to the interoffice fiber that was paid for by that settlement there's been some talk of carrier grade there's some analysis with it which is useful and then you have evan carlson who was here for the faux t-cab meeting saying that we're all building carrier grade and fx saying we've been at 13 years and we're not we're close to providing carrier grade so you've got to disconnect there but public safety grade carrier grade utility grade the distribution utilities are implementing an architecture of distributed storage and distributed generation big battery containers and solar fields and wind turbines that can be accessed and access the grid and even fail into micro grids to keep folks online when the whole regional grid might go down uh that can't be done with consumer grade fiber designed for you know that that requires a level of engineering that we have failed to do here and we can't afford to waste this money and do a half-baked job so we need an integrated planning process it it's going to be challenging to change paths at this date but we must we we must if we're not going to waste this money end up with the job half done we need integration of dense wave division multiplexing building off of the the velco network we need active fiber ethernet we of course need internet that's what we're seem to be fixated on we need fixed wireless access it's not going to be economical for the northeast kingdom and many other areas to do you know an extra mile of fiber to serve one address you know it will never pay itself back if everywhere that fixed wireless access can provide a final or replace a fiber drop it'll leave more money to get the job done in the uh more dense areas we need neutral host lte to fill the dead zones and to provide uh public safety failover when first net fails again we need a failure failures analysis we've had fiber cuts i believe three in my memory in recent years that took down all the state systems and yet there's no analysis of that what caused it or how to prevent it in the future in this plan in this draft we need an analysis of cloud hosting our state government phone system our zoom and teams video uh platforms our cisco video platforms are all hosted on out-of-state cloud servers that will not be functional after a big storm and a lot of backhaul is taken down so what state applications are dependent on remote cloud and what needs to be hosted on in-state cloud so to in order to support restore from a a disaster uh gmp underground there's let's can't mention of that gmp has begun and done a few pilot projects of a underground burial of power cables it's called a vibratory plow and it can bring four tubes at once bury four tubes at once in one pass repacking over the top four feet deep that's typically going to be three phases of ac current and a second conduit for that can be used for communications that begs the question which communications carrier is going to get in there first or are we going to insist that that be a neutral host up neutral host platform that any carrier can ride in those spans uh this is urgent because once those ditches are open and closed we're not going back to re-dig them in the same place and that machine can only reach so far off the road there needs to be statutory authority to uh constrain what municipal officials can make unrealistic expectations of how far off the road they're asking the vibratory plow to go so the machine can't reach 20 feet off the road so if we're going to do this who's going to pay for settling later if as this ditch settles and culverts or whatever need to be fine tuned is that the electric grade payers is that our green mount power is it on the the uh the fiber conduit is it on the contractor you know that these things need to be addressed or we will have another huge missed opportunity to not get i'm especially concerned with getting buried cable up to the mountaintops where our emergency communications are are gonna are located already or will additionally be located because we can't afford to have a windstorm or an ice storm tear down our backhaul to our emergency radio systems so the pole-owning utilities should be building and maintaining the fiber including repair obligations that's the only economical way to make take maximum advantage and to to adhere to the open access statutory requirement i mean have you all not called your contractor on the absurdity of ignoring the open access requirement that's in statute and pretending oh we'll just fix that with changes in the statute later are you really a thinking of allowing reesey to get away with that that can't be you can't have written a contract that allows that the contract says you will adhere to statute and are you just overlooking that that smoke and mirrors anybody new need to talk no still used even so we need to rethink our design and pursue a statewide integrated design we need to address the secrecy of cud's and what is legitimately critical infrastructure what is legitimately uh security sensitive and what is legitimately secret and everything else should be public again that information analysis is missing so again the integrated planning is required now with green mountain power first light cci v tail the cud's velco and lumen um i know at&t still has a few strands of fiber from the old days i'm not sure if we would try to get on any of that um the neutral host lte infill strategy is going to require spectrum it's going to require towers it's going to require engineering and maintenance expertise it's going to require billing it's going to require roaming agreements the pathetic proposal uh to try to pick it off one little pilot project at a time you know is it's really absurd it it will not get we will not see success and this has to be totally integrated with the work that mission critical partners is doing for the public safety communications task force i you really need to get up to speed again again i don't have any uh illusion that we're going to be able to turn this sows here into a silk purse by june i think we're going to need to postpone the adoption of this plan for another year and figure out what team is going to clean up the mess after reese fumbled it for a second iteration and six hundred thousand dollars of public money later or go after a return of some of that so you need to get busy with the prerequisites for a plan and the AMO coordination to get the public involved to participate in this you you can't just run on and pretend you're going to get away with carrying on a charade of a statutory required process and implement this plan thank you thank you for your input steven you still have oh you still have 13 minutes left i'll add a few more comments okay go ahead uh distance education public meetings statewide public meetings managed by the statewide channel that was part of the settlement with the access media organizations prisoner visitation courts arrangements etc we need high quality sites more along the v it model uh where the lighting the microphones the bandwidth uh the speakers for people who are present in the room are all first rate we cannot compromise the rights of prisoners we cannot have the historical archive of our public meetings uh be unintelligible as some of these transcripts and as some of these recordings are based on uh insufficient attention to detail of where these people are trying to connect from it may be that remote participation in legislative process or in these hearings should have to be at a certified site that has the proper lighting microphones and bandwidth to support proper participation and recording um same with distance ed uh the nursing program flunked everybody out when the colleges switched to you know adobe platform uh literally more than half of the students flunked out it just didn't work and so we're we're and else touch briefly on the wireless the initiative that we did at the beginning of covid throw a lot of wireless access points out there and and not check whether the backhaul connectivity was sufficient to support any number of users at a time and then let that whole system atrophy we should have planned that properly and strengthened it so that the next uh storm or disaster uh people know where they will be able to go and pick up some wi-fi if all their home systems are down locating what's in the public right away needs to be a priority comcast has been hiding for years behind the fact that they're amplifiers that power the nodes the green boxes this you know two-foot cube boxes those when those lose power from a car accident or a meter getting smashed or whatever an entire section goes dead and no one can make a 911 call and that can't be allowed we we we need to strengthen that network and as well as strengthen solutions for all VoIP customers new and emerging current and emerging to have uh emergency calling access regardless of this the grid status um i think those were the couple points i had forgotten thank you i'm sure nobody wants to talk about why there's nobody here you've got a cricket recording on there Aaron for us i planned doorbell recording to cause my talk to go nuts crickets is a good idea nor make these meetings a little bit more interesting snacks snacks i had fun seems to work at all my kids for events ring snacks or hill farm edward chocolate chip cookies over the weekend but they're gone or who will farm bill farmstead edward it's their best-selling IPA what was the problem with the screen i'm unsure i came in earlier today when i was in the office and it was working i don't know if it maybe needed to be rebooted if someone rebooted over the weekend i know friday they continued to have issues with it so could have been a windows update and the windows updates happened last tuesday statewide and that's caused other issues elsewhere so it's hard to tell with this device this device is this is the only thing it's used for it's like the camera connected to oh it's not really a tablet because it doesn't really do anything except fill that meeting connected to the tv well had it been a full v it site with 50 people in the room we would have been wishing we hadn't used hp slices so v it doesn't exist anymore next gen v it exists on paper yeah the original was all run on tdm stuff though it was really obsolete near the end so a few of those up it was interesting work for a company in the northeast kingdom and it did some of that work there's no reason it can't run on gigabit ethernet no it was a and be broadcast quality and scale to stream the governor statewide addresses and things like that that would be a good chapter that would be a fun chapter to write for your plan got all year to do it i mean it'll be interesting to see how the telecommunications division team can develop the courage and the integrity to either persuade jim porter and june tierney or go to the legislature or the governor directly and expose this farce this hoax and we should go after rici for some of the funds they've accrued without delivering specifically every count of the last plan that was not did not meet the statutory requirements or their contractual requirements and similarly this time maybe we can cut bait for a hundred thousand and have three hundred thousand to find another contractor one of those rabbit ears in your work of act the white that's what streams it i don't know all the technicalities oh i see you're you're streaming that's um what gets the signal up to the college i think that's what gets them okay let's know how to put them together all right fair is it a cradle point i think it's connected to data but is it you don't know if it's using lte or is it using the wi-fi in the building right now it's using data generally like using the wi-fi it's too unreliable yeah i was speaking a few minutes ago the broadcast cax and ptsz they have like a box multi-thousand dollar box or even tens of thousands with four or five lte cards in it so they're ganging together bonding together lte data channels to get the bandwidth they need okay and they say they use wi-fi or ethernet and this is so they trust the wi-fi so they use this thing if they anything to either then engineer and that's what actually broadcasts it over to tessar and to put on youtube it is 5 59 so we are going to wrap up the meeting in anticipation that it takes me roughly 60 seconds to get through this last piece thank you all for attending again if you have comments um and you would like us to receive them in writing that makes it much easier otherwise we'll go through the transcript and we'll include your commentary in the final draft of the 10-year telecom report um i think that is about all we have any other comments before we close it's not a report it's supposed to be a plan thank you for your input mr whitaker all right thank you everyone for attending have a good evening bye bye bye everyone bye thank you