 Issues, we're here tonight to discuss the 10 year telecommunications plan. This is our third public hearing on the plan, actually fourth, if you count the legislative hearing we had on Tuesday, and we're here to get public input on the plan. Both me tonight is Matt Dunn from RISI and CTC, they're the consultants that were hired to create the plan, and so they've published, or we have published a final draft, and we're here tonight to get comment on that final draft before we adopt the plan. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Matt for an abbreviated introduction to the plan, and then we're going to go to public comment. Given tonight that we have a pretty healthy audience here in Craftsbury, we may start with the Craftsbury folks, and then we'll move to the folks online to take their comment. So with that, Matt, I'll turn it over to you. Great, thank you, Clay. I'm not sure if you can see my screen, currently. Great. Excellent. Well, it is great to be with you all. It's been an interesting couple of weeks doing this presentation. I was in Springfield myself yesterday to do the presentation, and it's great to be beaming into you in Cabot from here in Heartland. I'm going to do this a little bit more quickly so we can get to comments. The 10-year telecommunication plan is obviously a 300-page plus document. This is meant to just give a quick overview to frame how we arrived at this plan and the focus, and I'm just going to walk through it very quickly given the time and the interest that is here. So we've zeroed in on creating this 10-year plan based on the moment that we're in, which is a time coming out of the pandemic where the focus on having universal broadband to every person in the state of Vermont is front and center on people's minds, and fortunately on the minds of appropriators, both at the state and at the federal level. So we really zeroed in on how to ensure that future proof infrastructure was put in place using those resources and that momentum in the near term. There are obviously lots of pieces to the comprehensive plan that we did address, but this was where we focused most of our time of attention. Part of that was doing a renewed analysis of where there is still broadband that is below what is considered served by the FCC, which is lower than 25 megabits down and 3 megabit up service, which is what you would typically get from cable service. And we then also did analysis to estimate the approximate cost. This represents by our analysis 51,000 premises across the state of Vermont, and our estimate is that to reach those premises with 100 over 100 fiber to the home service, which we'll talk about why we zeroed in on that, is a cost of between $360 million and $440 million. The difference there really being whether you count as a premise to serve those entities that are considered camps and those that are not considered camps, and that's where that range comes from. The ARPA stimulus money that has been appropriated to date and that is available to be appropriated in the year to come actually provides a unique opportunity to make a huge dent in this process and the resources that it could leverage through public and private partnerships, as well as the resources that we hope will also come through from a infrastructure bill from Congress could get us all the way there. These are the core values that we followed in developing this plan focusing on efficiency, longevity, local control, which has been reiterated in the legislation that has come out recently that CUDs should be a, the communication union districts should be a primary vehicle for distributing these resources and prioritizing how those resources are using and achieving this goal, and then equity to make sure that first and foremost there's the infrastructure to ensure that all Vermonters have access to high speed internet regardless of geography and that they not only have the access to infrastructure, but they are able to obtain that connectivity regardless of income race or any other factor. The on the terrestrial broadband front of bringing fiber to the home and meeting the state's goal of a hundred over a hundred service has gotten a little bit complicated by funding efforts that have gone on from the feds over the last year. The RDOF reverse auction that came through provided subsidy to certain internet service providers in concentrated areas and then to wireless providers and other non-fiber to the home providers in other areas and it just made the overall planning of a sustainable broadband network a little more difficult and so it's certainly come into account as we were doing our analysis, but it has made the planning process a little more challenging. It's important to note that stimulus money is going everywhere in the country and it is creating an intense labor and market demand which means that the construction costs are going to be variable based on those and the third thing that we just want to make sure everyone understands is that communication union districts vary widely. Some are very mature having actually deployed broadband and run an ISP for a number of years and others that have just finished forming with all volunteer boards. There is going to be a real need for support by both financially and technical and legal to the CUDs to allow them to be successful in meeting this goal and being the vehicle for meeting this goal. We did look at the legislation that was moving through the legislature this year. We actually had arrived at a similar framework on our own and we believe that there is a lot of good in how that legislation came together. We provided a little more specifics in our recommendations in order to be able to get to the last mile, but we also stated that it would be really important for the resources to be prioritizing those locations that do not currently have 25.3 and the reason is that those are the places where there is a market failure currently which is why they don't have 25.3 to date and this investment would actually allow those communities and locations to leapfrog to gigabit speed internet in a mechanism that can be scaled over time. So certainly starting with a minimum of 100 over 100 but with fiber to the home it can scale as demand grows which it is at approximately 20 to 30 percent speed demand increases on an annual basis and the other assumption that's in there is that in the places where the marketplace did encourage cable to be deployed already. Those premises will be fine in the near term and the market forces are likely to bring those to 100 over 100 capability either through overbuilding that we're seeing some ISPs doing and bringing fiber to those locations or in the advancements in cable deployment. We do not think that's a guarantee by any stretch but there is a good reason to believe that those locations will get faster and faster broadband which is why if there are limited resources they should go to those places that aren't being currently served by the market. We have a number of different additional considerations given age 360 as past which I'm not going to go into detail on but we have included in the plan. We've also included technical standards for the subsidized network deployments that we think are critical in order to make sure that the infrastructure is robust, does not have host remote isolation or other challenges if not built well, that there's interoperability in that it can support other kinds of capacity including self-service expansion as well as public safety. We also look to the long term this is a 10-year plan which is a challenging thing to do with given the rapid transformation of technology over a decade but in within that 10-year plan we believe that CUDs can once they completed a deployment be directly involved in helping ensure that now that the infrastructure is available that all individuals have access to that broadband and can get access to the devices and the skills necessary to take advantage of that world-class broadband. Obviously doing so in collaborations with libraries, schools, peg television, many of the social service organizations around the state but CUDs have a potential role to play to be that center of equal access to broadband that we are all hoping for. Certainly mobile broadband and cellular service are a critical piece to the overall broadband infrastructure. I will start out by saying that doing Fiber to the Home and a robust symmetrical system will significantly advance the opportunity to bring mobile to the rest of the state so it's the right priority to be putting front and center. We did do a new propagation analysis as well as match that with some of the driving analysis that was done by the department to be able to get a sense of where there is mobile and where there's not. As was pointed out yesterday there has been deployments since this analysis was done and including the driving so there may be some additional places that are covered but to be clear the number of addresses that are covered is still not a huge number particularly if you're wanting to get cell service indoors. Now cell service indoors can be addressed if there's high-speed internet through using Wi-Fi mobile mechanisms but still 40% of the addresses are not covered on an outdoor basis and it's going to be important to continue the march down the road to be able to get greater and greater coverage. This is analysis in terms of road coverage which is important for safety. Clearly there's been a fair bit of progress on class one roads but that's a very small percentage less than 1% of the total road miles in the state and other types of roads that make up the majority of the road miles are just over 50% covered. We do have some recommendations of how public funds could be used effectively to invite public-private partnerships to the table in order to be able to deliver more mobile coverage. Some of those could be all private, some of them could be public-private, some of them could be largely public and we provide a mechanism for doing that through an RFP process that would be collaborative in nature and really focused on solutions that can be deployed given the topography of Vermont but also Vermonters aversion to certain tower infrastructure so we do get into that detail if there is the willingness to allocate funds for mobile service deployment. We do have a fair bit in the plan on public safety needs specifically on land mobile radio infrastructure that is aging in many parts of the state and needs upgrades because neither FirstNet nor other services are reliable enough for public safety and we also are put in the plan the types of funding that is available at the federal level specifically to underwrite this kind of upgrade investment. We also get into the issues of grid power dependency for 911 calls and some recommendations for how to address that kind of situation where battery backup is not as robust as we would hope it would be both at the premise and elsewhere throughout the network. We've gotten some very good feedback on what has been incorporated into the plan and have attempted to respond to that feedback with recommendations moving forward. Last piece is just a section on peg television to talk about the importance of it to our state as well as an acknowledgement of the Berkshire report and some discussion about the search and importance of finding a permanent ongoing financing option for peg television as well as encouraging general fund support until that long-term funding source can be established. There you are. Well thank you very much Matt and I apologize for not at all. Go quick here do my little troubles with our meeting owl. It is a cool device I wish we could get it to work. So what's that? Yes so you can see in the lower left hand corner we're seeing the room from my computer camera. So I think we'll start with taking testimony and input from folks here in Craftsbury. We're in Craftsbury tonight and so what I have is set up here as a throne and when you want to give your comment just have a seat in the chair here and we'll take your comment and then we'll cycle through and then once we're done with folks here who would like to participate we'll move to online and then to the phone. So with that if I could just take a quick poll who would like to provide a comment to start with Christine thank you and while we're setting up here if folks want to speak we're online just raise your hand and so we can we can get that there we go. So I appreciate that so with that Christine I just state your name and then provide your comment. I'm Christine Holquist I'm actually here I'm the administrator for Memorial Fibernet as well as NEK Community Broadband so I'm representing those too but and I'll start by saying you know that I think this is a very well-written plan both from a from a technology standpoint from a financial standpoint and from a public policy standpoint and you know my experience goes way back into the early thousands when started at Vermont Electric Co-op we started pursuing the smart grid and we really tested all kinds of different technologies you know we actually partnered with Nordic Enterprise and personally was involved with the Enterprise getting the fiber built early on because we recognize how important fiber optic was in terms of reliability to provide utility network. So and and of course serving northeast kingdom we didn't have a lot of money so we had to had to punt and we dealt with wireless we dealt with fixed wireless we dealt with our own 900 megahertz bands and you know I can tell you from a technical standpoint I totally aligned with what the 10-year telecom plan talks about we really have to migrate the fiber from a resiliency and then pay attention when we design for redundant rings and that's all addressed from the planet. From a financial standpoint you know if I take the information from LeMoyle Fibernet and the high-level design that was done there as and I take the information from NEK Brownband and extrapolate that data from their high-level design really come up with basically extrapolate that statement and somewhere around 350 to 450 million is what we have spent so I think from and I look at the finances that were in the plan they were good and from a public policy standpoint directing the money through the CUDs will resolve the best effort and I'll tell you that I worked on both sides the private industry as well as the as well as in the co-ops and I and I've been always impressed with what public boards can do so with that said you know I will say that we as a as a communication unit districts we definitely want to participate and collaborate in how we improve mobile wireless as well as public safety and in the plan we talk about and I can testify from my previous experiences CEO of an electric clock we have good reliable emergency safety radio networks now that's addressed in the plan and so when we move to you know digital online next we have to be careful about that but again CUDs can be central in helping that and Matt the further fact that you know you get fiber out there and it'll help get that radio out there further from a technical standpoint you want to be careful not to get too specific around the technical details I would advise that we have a technical advisory group as part of the Vermont Community Broadband Board to really work on those you know basically what are the requirements from and what are and what are the recommendations and then what are the procedural best practices um so so overall nice job and I also want to compliment the department you know I've talked to at least a dozen different design engineering firms across the country and we have the best data in the country in terms of GIS data and information public information available so I'm I'm pretty proud of where Vermont is today um we've all been you know around for a long time trying to work this week maybe you know I can I can tell you along with me about the mistakes I've made but that's certainly I think we're all in a good place right now so thank you right thank you very much for your comment uh next in Craftsbury all right thank you my name is Brian Machosny I'm a resident of Craftsbury I was the chairman of the broadband committee here in town that got funding for and built out something over 13 miles of fiber to the premise across town it's ended up serving about half of the addresses in town between the existing fiber that the state had put up a number of years ago and the number of new fiber that we put up through the project certainly any number of businesses particularly but homes as well individuals that now have access to the broadband service have said they actually can't remember what it was like when they were on DSL you know the level of performance of course is much higher but even more importantly the level of reliability is so much better than it was before it's allowed them in some cases to retain employees where they were having trouble retaining employees before because it was simply too frustrating to try to do business in this part of the country um so there's just been a lot of positive outcomes that were a little bit unexpected frankly and we'd like to see that done more we'd like to do more to close the opportunity gap between rural and and city type dwelling and and you know really make the northeast kingdom an attractive place for people to live from that point of view that said I have a couple of questions my first question is um in the 340 odd million dollars that the department is talking about spending is that for a dark fiber network only where the ISPs would commit and provide the rest of the infrastructure for the service let's suppose we can answer that question uh I believe that figure is to to provide uh internet to every unserved address but there's a there might be a considerable difference in the overall expenditure when you add on all of the switches routers et cetera access points that need to be provided to to round out the dark fiber so my question is it it was I mean it was a comprehensive analysis of the of of all of those types of aspects and we got into some detail on it in the in the plan of what we were considering so not just paying for drops or those kinds of things but in fact the entire network based on the the information we were able to gather and the work that ctc has done uh engineering similar projects throughout the country okay so it would include the electronics as well not just the dark fiber network it would turn turn key um thank you the uh the other thing that we found in kraftsbury doing this project was um the firm that we contracted to do the design included a lot of slack in the in the dark fiber and we simply couldn't afford it and as we talked to more and more people we found that it was less and less necessary that the additional slack that was designed into the network was generally not found to improve the survivability or the ability to recover from damage to the dark fiber or to the fiber so um I wondered to what extent the department working with the consultants have looked into basically you know middle mile kind of network slack for example if you looked at the network that the town has constructed there's just a lot less slack loops than if you look at what the what the department built it was called what was called remand what back in the day when they put up the fiber that ran up sorry vta than the vta fiber lots of slack lots of snowshoes obviously and well designed well engineered highly redundant uh kind of service but something we just couldn't afford um so I wonder how much do you think we might be able to save and therefore provide either better service to more people or get into uh get get service to more people faster if we collapse the slack down substantially I think the vta fiber they built it as a middle mile open access fiber so that slack was put in there to accommodate all the conceivable uses of of the fiber um not knowing exactly who would use it for what when I see uh whereas your network's the last mile network it's very clear that it's for residential internet service so I don't again I think that the the estimate that Matt and ctc have come up with is is based on a network much like what craft sparing is built in okay not like with vta yeah and we did a separate report two years ago that estimated is the same cost at around 300 000 300 million excuse me so uh matt's only increased this cost by 60 million or so so it's in the same ballpark thank you very much great thank you for your comment appreciate it uh next in craft spary don't you can touch it all you want now because it doesn't work hi my name is rudy chase i'm a craft spary resident i'm also on the craft spary broadband committee i work along with christine hawkwist and and over 30 member towns um this has come at a great time and not so great time we've just gone through cobit and we figured out how important it is to be able to communicate in a time like this um with zoom meetings and being able to talk with other people that you couldn't you couldn't see and so um even though i'm on the broadband committee i'm really looking at this from the kind of average citizen point of view we've got 30 some odd towns in our cud and you're talking about a 10-year plan and as i mentioned in one of the last cud meetings that's not going to be fast enough for a lot of people there were doctors visits done over zoom and just you know infinity to what zoom was able to accomplish um i even though i'm on the broadband committee i struggle with why are towns having to band together to improve something that is painfully obvious now this is a necessity as is water as is electricity um i had granddaughters that struggled to do school work during this whole process because of broadband and connectivity issues uh so i just as a as a citizen i'm trying to um have you understand that this is vitally important and people in the state need broadband um and it won't happen fast enough but is there a plan on the state level to push this along at a at a greater rate than 10 years i know 10 years might be the the stretch goal but what are we really looking at for a town like frasbury to be 100 covered with 100 100 and i'm sure there's other towns that that feel the same way and it's just it's vitally important i'm also on the hazard mitigation team here in town and um hazards can be mitigated if people can talk and communicate and where is the road washed out and where is that bridge a problem and those kind of things as we've seen with things like front porch forum and other uh internet based uh you know connectivity so i'm just uh again as an average citizen i'm just uh trying to understand uh have you understand how how greatly important it is that we get this thing off the ground and uh and and make it work as uh short a compressed time frame as possible that's really all i have to say great thank you so much just one one clarifying thing is the next person comes up clay is that the the 10 year telecommunication plan is looking at a 10 year time horizon but that's not the uh time horizon that we believe it would take pending funding to be able to build out fiber to the home uh to all of the currently unserved and underserved locations so um and we did talk about needing to move with uh speed uh in order to both seize the opportunity and to be able to uh meet for monitors where they are um my name is christine fountain i know it's been a long time um i am a resident of the town of albany i currently represent albany on the anyk community uh communication union district um and i'm uh the vice chair of the cud i'm also the vice chair of the vermont uh communication union districts association and i'm just here to make verbal testimony on our behalf we are or have i think maybe already submitted written comments that were approved by our board on wednesday but um overall we want to come out firmly behind this plan on a high level uh we strongly support its focus on community-driven resilient fiber-based solutions um our members generally agree with the top level finding and we're very pleased with the confidence given to cuds and want to say that we are ready and we are in it and we're going to make this happen for our community um we agree that uh the stimulus funds are the funds that we need to make this happen we agree that cud's our best position to use these funds because of our access to the municipal bond market and we can stretch these funds as far as they can possibly go we generally agree with the requirements proposed in this plan for accessing the funding we do caution um putting too much specificity in state grant requirements in terms of technical components we think those are better developed collaboratively um and we expect that will be forthcoming um we do we actually support the concept proposed in this plan that the so-called pro-consumer values of net neutrality um and open access be priorities they are priorities for our cud but as we attempt to create partnerships to really bring service to all our members we need to consider a variety of options um net neutrality for most of us we will not agree to any the partnership that does not um allow net neutrality but you know I think it needs to be a negotiating point it needs to be possible um open access means many different things to different people and in a rural primarily residential network uh that needs to be defined differently and we appreciate the flexibility that that framework would give us um we agree that the community broadband board has work to do to establish specific procedures for determining what constitutes a conflict with the cud universal service plan but we strongly believe that cud should have input on this point our universal service plans are described by our business plans and by our network designs and we believe that any proposal that overlaps with those networks networks as design should not be awarded funding um we also agree we need a strategy for expanding cellular coverage and strengthening public safety networks and we want to be a part of that so we hope to be involved in that conversation um we have uh specific points of critique but um we get into those in our commentary um at a high level uh just want to say let's work out the technical specs together um number one number two um we believe a low-income plan is better thought of as a low-income subsidy and should come at the state level for the federal level and that the cost of providing a low-income plan should not fall just to the cud we of course want to offer a affordable broadband but in the any case if we were forced to provide a low-income plan we could be providing it to half or more of our customers and that would make our business plan unworkable so we would rather focus on creating a plan that brings the most affordable broadband to the widest number of people and then you know offer subsidy across the entire state um let's see the last couple things um the the uh the peg access channels their work is so important and they need there needs to be a funding solution for them as we've heard from so many great advocates who have spoken but we really urge you to not increase the costs of rolling out broadband to our most rural areas do not um increase our cost to solve this challenge I I know we can find a way that doesn't do that so thank you very much thank you if anyone Michael would you like to have a comment you just slide the chair back to my feet yeah no it's all right uh it's slowly moving forward yeah that's perfect hello so i'm michael werner down a little map let's say um I um I'm the owner of two ISPs one is a wireless ISP cloud lines the other is fiber ISP and fiber and I like both of them I like both technologies I'm technology agnostic um the plan is written I think is 90 wonderful and I really support it I'm here to offer some suggestions to improve it but don't take those as criticisms because I listen to a lot of the public hearings and online and and the public comment hearings that preceded um I don't want to go to places that people have already been so um I'll take my time to mention some things I don't think I've heard um on two topics even though I could talk all night on all of them because I would love to so the two topics I want to talk about are how the plan addresses fixed wireless and the other one is our dog so the fixed uh I'm looking at your plan here on my laptop and the the conclusion that fixed wireless has strengths in some use cases but it's not a viable solution it's only for the state's broadband gaps I think there's a correct conclusion I think it was arrived at with some incorrect data and I think that because of that there are strengths that fix wireless that still belong in the state plan um to a greater extent than they appear than it appears in the plan um one thing everyone keeps mentioning is resiliency there is no such thing as a single resilient system there every system has vulnerabilities in disasters it's often that the wireless systems um are back up faster and more more able to help um get people connected and get people help so um that's one thing one one strong argument for fixed wireless um the conclusion um that fixed wireless is more costly than fiber in the long run I think is incorrect and it's based on I'm slowing down to find them certain certain data points such as well I can't find them right now um the cost per cost per um passing or um both fiber and or fixed wireless seem to be inflated even more so in the case of fiber in the case of fixed wireless I think there was a suggestion that it cost 60 000 a year for a risk to have space on a tower well that's not a Vermont number we pay a thousand or two thousand a year for space on towers um or we have our own towers that didn't cost that much to build or we had help from state funding to build towers the wisps in Vermont have been very um well we're Vermonters we know how to use duct tape and bailing wire and all kinds of things to make things work so we've found very inexpensive ways to get antennas and radios on towers and on silos and on barns to deliver fixed wireless service for an economical total cost and so when you start comparing the cost between the two technologies it's it's just kind of not fair first of all it's not 16 000 per passing per fiber and nor is it I forget what the number was for 2400 uh that's for upgrades um it was higher than that for fixed wireless they're both too high and they didn't take in I think those must be national or even urban numbers because the numbers just want in uh totals higher than they ought to be in our environment um um wisps fixed wireless doesn't need line of sight and in in the plan it states that um and requires clear or merely clear line of sight for optimum performance it's just not true it's true that certain frequencies will not do well without line of sight but that's not true for all of them and um cbrs frequencies the 3.5 gigahertz frequencies that we're using now are doing fine through trees just fine and instead of there's a statement in here that you'll be lucky to get 25 megs um per second from cbrs in our certification testing for the department we're getting tests in 60 70 80 megabits per second through trees at right oh and I think there was no there was a distance by qualifier in there too we've we've got a customer who is i have 14 miles away and is getting more than 25 megs so the data that was used unfortunately wasn't accurate from our experience I can't speak for others I'm sure it was accurate for some places and for some systems but it's not what we've seen and I hope and trust that the consultants did talk to vermont wisps and get data directly from vermont wisps I can only say that our company was never consulted so I don't know about others there are a dozen wisps in the state and I wonder if if and how many were consulted um so despite that if I was given a choice can I have fiber at my house or fixed wireless I'll take fiber any day this fiber now can do a thousand or 10,000 megabits per second and fixed wireless can do a thousand or maybe a little more with very special equipment if it's a perfect line of sight and very short distance but in general most vermontis don't need more than 25 three or 25 eight which is what we can deliver easily um they most vermontis do need more than one or two or three megabits per second upstream because upstream is really important but symmetry isn't essential symmetry is wonderful it's especially wonderful for businesses but most vermontis don't need that so in the short term fixed wireless should have a place in the 10-year plan not maybe necessarily the majority solution forever but it shouldn't be given such short trip I'm going to see if there's other notes I made here and well I'll leave it at that I think I've made the point I'm going to make and I'll switch to Ardolf so our company was the second most successful Ardolf winner in the state of Vermont and it's there at all and yet generally speaking the department and the consultants have assumed that any location that has been awarded Ardolf subsidy should be considered served because it will be served by the providers who won in the auction well I think it's correct to say that the providers who won the auction will serve those locations that's the nature of the auction it's an obligation if you get the support you're obliged to do it but it's naive to think that one location a mile away that wasn't Ardolf subsidized should be a hundred percent subsidized to ARCA or stimulus grant funds funneled to the state DCUVs or otherwise and then a another location on the other side of that mile that has been received Ardolf subsidy in at the level of 20 or 25 or 30 percent of the FCC's model for what it costs and it's also naive to think that in isolation those Ardolf census blocks can be served for the subsidy that's been provided or even if they were a hundred percent subsidized without them being part of a larger network that connects them because they're all isolated with all little measles on a map and so they aren't large areas that economically work therefore Ardolf subsidized locations depending on the level of subsidy that the FCC grants and granted in the auction should be entitled to some additional subsidy just like their neighbors getting potentially a hundred percent subsidy um in fact the argument might be well you've been in it you made your bed sleeping in it now you took on that obligation that's the argument I've heard from the department and I understand that argument but the department and the planners should understand that when companies did in that auction they were aware that there were other subsidies available they were aware that there was other potential funding and that they were taking extreme risk and shouldn't be punished because they won at a low level in the Ardolf auction so I think I've made my point I think that Ardolf's locations should not be considered served or they should not be considered ineligible for any subsidy any support can we provide support to your competitors for the same census block sure sure I'm not looking for something special I just think um if we're getting 20 percent subsidy for one location for one whole census block or a whole group of census blocks and our competitors are getting a hundred percent subsidy but there's no equity there and yet we're our locations are considered off limits both in the GMT and the DEC tariff um uh special tariff for make ready and and potential um awards of grants from the community broadband authority so those are the two points I wanted to make that they're not criticisms of the plan itself but their requests for reconsideration of those two issues great thank you very much thank you appreciate it you have any questions for me no no I think we're good I've got a lot of people I have we got two people online but Stephen would you like to go before we move to the folks online oh let's let's just do all the folks here and then would everyone be okay with Stephen giving his comment first and then we'll move to the two folks on the internet and then I see there's no comment just listening so we're good so I want to second Michael's both of Michael's major points I'm glad I had one of those on my list for the night I could scratch off that's the ARDOF issue but he added a lot more detail to that than I could because I don't have a stake horse in that race uh I'm going to start with one paragraph from last night this is not a plan that meets statutory requirements by any stretch the statute requires addressing each of the goals of 202c and that quote is developing the plan the department shall address each of the state telecommunication policies and goals of 202c of this title and shall assess initiatives designed to advance and make measurable progress with respect to each of those policies and goals the assessment shall include identification of the resources required and potential sources of funding for plan implementation there is none of that in this document that's why I don't call it a plan so I think we've got a problem with folks who are expecting money from you trying to flatter you when the law is the law and this plan doesn't cut it the serve unserved counts also not included in these counts the statutory goal is 100 to 100 by 2024 and that requires finding a plan developing a plan to deliver Fiber's feed service to all of those that are only serving 25 three today Stephen I'm sorry to interrupt if you want to stare down Matt you got a look here oh oh Matt you're on me I want to see come on there's to see your expression okay I want to see your eye rolls and all that you won't see is not the fact that this document does not come up with a strategy to deliver Fiber's feed service to all of those 25 three addresses is a huge gaping void in this and to say that it'll get there someday but we also risk running out of month this couple hundred million that we have is not going to be sufficient especially if we dispense it in an experimental manner to a bunch of CUDs that have very little building expertise in a marketplace that is over over taxed for manpower and materials therefore driving prices up so we're going to end up at a cliff where a whole lot of people are going to end up with nothing unless we incorporate some fixed wireless strategy to serve people sooner than the fiber can get there and to serve them in the event the money runs out and we have planned something is better than nothing and especially if we can do fixed wireless in a way that also infills the mobile wireless gaps so I just think that that is the type of strategy that needs to be fleshed out in this plan if it's to be useful it should not be adopted it doesn't meet the statutory requirements the idea of giving local control is not the same it does not equal not the standing loss there is no notwithstanding clause in the statute that allows any K broadband or any other CUD to negotiate away competitive choice or open access or net neutrality those are not negotiable those are statute and to you know it's just it's misleading to let CUDs think that they're going to be able to bargain that stuff away in order to enter a partnership because it won't hold up in court you know so as far as the public process and the effective public participation I want to point out that the telecommunication is a connectivity advisory board when this first draft came out requested a table to be at the front of the plan that would highlight that would expressly link each of the statutory plan requirements and goals to the sections that implemented and even recommend who might who might take lead on each that didn't happen the telecommunications and connectivity advisory board is a statutory body to advise on the plan and they were snub they asked for a red line version and I I've never seen it but I heard somebody might have gotten it the night before the last meeting but to in effect snub the statutory body that's supposed to be giving year-round full-time full-on advice on this plan is absurd you know it's just so disconnected from what's supposed to be happening here I made public comments many public comments in writing and some verbally most of which were just summarily dismissed or trivialized not by professional consultants or engineers but by a department of public service staff person who didn't want to hear you know pointing out that we need to first answer the question of active versus passive we need to answer the question of how much we're going to be able to rely on the Velco infrastructure and build off of that for both central management self-healing and evolving their ring network into a mesh network that that capacity that speed is would save enormous sums of duplicate of work that the CUDs are about to embark on similarly with pole attachments if the DUs are able to build fiber most cost effectively because they already have the crews they already have the trucks they own the poles no make ready is necessary and no pole attachment fees are part so those are fundamental things that might actually make it possible to accomplish this in the time required and with the money available and yet those are missing from this plan or so called plan so public safety should have a right of first refusal on all wireless powers for placement with protocols for resolving interference issues if any we need a map of the state fiber we need a map of the state fiber access points I think it's a missed opportunity to have spent public money on installing fiber access points around the northeast kingdom but have not it's not made available access to any of the fibers that aren't already spoken for by a local one local business person so to to not make available fibers for competitive for available for lease still available for lease or for fiber back might small cell backhaul etc unless they have to go through a vendor who already leased some of those fibers it was just a missed opportunity we should have broken out more than those 48 fibers while we were spending public money so where are those fiber access points and how do they overlay with the gaps in cell service if we know that we have gaps in cell service with frequent power outages those should be our priority locations for installing small cell resilient sites for people to be able to call for help in extended power outages that's the kind of planning that this should be in this document and it is in here and we can't wait three years we can't wait there's a lot of people who need broadband now uh folks who need to access telemedicine people need to call 901 i know a guy who was had a seizure ended up in a wheelbarrow wife had to wheel him into the house and run up a hill to get cell coverage to call for help so i'm sorry he ended up at a wheelbarrow the wife had to load him into a wheelbarrow to get him back into the house in order to go call thank you i don't think she wheeled him up the hill to the south side i think it's somebody you're aware of there was mentioned in one of the responses that there's states not aware of any cell of any spectrum that needs to be inventory this department was supposed to have inventory all the spectrum that could be available for broadband use five years ago and it still hasn't been done and i know the vermont state colleges have a significant swath and some of the private colleges as well uh they are an instrumentality in the state and they have spectrum that is currently being thought about in court uh which i would have hoped you would have been aware of and addressed in the plan that's two dot five gigahertz spectrum uh educational broadband service um resilience plan public dollars spares disaster plan um i think i'm gonna stop in favor because we're running late thank you steven appreciate it pick up on the next one all right we'll move to those who are online uh we'll start with uh angelique hi can you hear me okay yes and we can see you great um it's nice when the system works sometimes um so my name is angelique contest and i'm the executive director of mount mansfield community television serving jericho richman and under hill since 1997 i'm also the president of the vermont access network which has many of you know is made up of 25 community media centers in the state um so just to give you our current context in a normal year at mmc tv uh we produce over an hour of content a year uh an hour of content a day each year um and more than half of this is public meetings things like select board meetings and i can tell you that since march 2020 this number has greatly increased i believe we had 40 more content than in 2019 with all the virtual meetings and this year even more um and i just wanted to mention that the the thing that's been super helpful this year is having one gig up and down ethernet from a small local provider for a non-profit like us who was in the audio visual realm this has been really huge during the pandemic cut down on a lot of worries allowed us to help out the towns and the non-profits needing our help instead of us grappling with how we're going to communicate and bring everyone together so i am joining a chorus it turns out of community media center people weighing in on the draft telecom plan um it's been interesting to watch it evolve and i guess it's almost there um but we uh wanted to let you know that we appreciate being included in the plan um but we do wish it would put a little more wind under our wings for the decade ahead the work that we do is focused on giving vermonkers throughout the state voice and connecting them um and it has everything to do with this plan i've been in the field for about a decade myself enough to see improvements in a lot of the infrastructure around us in semi-rural vermont where i happen to be based and many of us are in even more rural areas which have even greater challenges um but we've also seen some lost opportunities and new threats to what we do um for instance while we all really cherish and one of the most valuable things we have is our old dvd and vhs archives um it really makes no sense in 2021 that we are still cable casting and standard definition and sort of dumbing down stuff we shoot on hd to get it out to the public um and when it comes to funding we all know the threat the elephant in the room while the shoe hasn't dropped yet we know it will um with the shift and this is acknowledged in the report in viewing habits and it's nice to see that in there we know that we're going to face a real challenge in the next five years or more or maybe less um and just uh the final point that you've heard in the recent hearings from others as well is um as you all know and we feel the state has really appreciated and our towns have um been closer um intertwined with the work we do over the past year in the time of crisis a lot of us have been in the trenches and now the new challenge is setting up hybrid meetings with our towns and helping them out with things like owls and remotely operated cameras I was just been troubleshooting in Richmond today um and uh we've made orca um our colleagues in Montpelier uh you know household name in Vermont with the work they've done with the governor's press conferences that's been you know we we didn't want to be in this pandemic but it was exciting that we could step in and help out um and we're all sharing the content and transmitting it in many households um so we're just we would like to see the plan to do a little more to future proof peg before it's finalized um and we would like you if you could take another look at that peg study which was funded by the state and which has a lot of interesting ideas and research about how we could make the ecosystem for all of us 25 small centers on small budgets how we could kind of take this moment when there's a lot of funds coming into Vermont to say hey wait how are we gonna balance the private and the public funding that's coming in you know for the benefit of all Vermonters and maybe this requires a little more braveness like maybe we don't just have to look at what other states are doing kind of like we did in the response to COVID we could kind of see maybe a little more about what works well in Vermont you know that makes sense for us today and like for a decade ahead so thanks for your time thank you very much for your comment I appreciate it we'll move next to leaf uh Goldberg so I can't see your entire name there you go leaf leaf Goldberg if you'd like to talk you're on mute can you hear me now uh we can hear you now yes but you can't see me that is true okay sorry about that no video on this browser so my name is leaf Goldberg and I'm the director at the Hardwick community television station following up with another testimony and also a neighboring town to Craftsbury where you where you all at um thanks for your work on on the plan it's pretty comprehensive so as a small rural peg station with a small budget we cover a full range of local content including all the government meetings and highly sought after sports broadcasts and what I hear most often from our community members is that they want to see as much local programming as possible this tells me that small communities like ours care deeply about the opportunity be represented um so I was interviewed for the Berkshire peg study back in I believe it was January and one of my questions was how how can hctv continue to cover our complete community including surrounding towns that are not within a cable service area and hence without cable funding including culturally rich towns like Craftsbury and Greensboro um so I do believe a new funding structure for peg could indeed expand coverage in an actual community as opposed to an area demarcated by cable lines um and you know we have done a ton of programming in Craftsbury even though it doesn't lie within any cable service area so I would really you know love to see some kind of funding structure that could represent the towns we actually cover and the community we actually cover it's an interesting thing of course we do you know our core work here in Hardwick and Woodbury and the little bit of Greensboro that is covered by Comcast but we do cover these other areas around us too and we do provide a service that local communities um really um look for um so I do believe and hope there can be a way forward to fund vital rural community peg centers like ours hopefully by way of new partnerships with this emergent technology structure the new systems that are amazingly outlined in your plan um but I hope you do please consider continuing your work to this end and uh specifically I encourage you to spend more time on the legal analysis of the Berkshire peg study that I was a part of thanks thanks a lot for your time great thank you very much for your comment all right what's that we're uh I think we're almost a half an hour over time uh in part to our technical difficulties in the beginning so I think we'll bring this hearing to a close uh I appreciate everyone's comments tonight um we'll have one more hearing uh this coming Monday in Dorset at the Dorset town offices uh so if you're uh I guess if you're in the area please stop in or um we'll be setting up an online forum much like this um so uh with that we'll close the meeting thank you very much and uh if you have more comments please do submit them uh online uh or uh to our email address which is psd.telecom at vermont.gov all right thank thank you very much have a good night thank you