[Music] we have in the audience today people who really did help make this [Applause] miracle [Music] fantastic what a wonderful wonderful accomplishment and you know all this started with what at the time was really a radical idea that if we in rural Vermont we're going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes and get us internet we'd be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren from an agricultural standpoint the benefit of highspeed Internet doesn't have anyt
hing to do with actually milking cows or growing crops we do that the same way we've done that my entire life when I was a kid it was just like there were Farms everywhere now we're the last Farm in straford as the farm Community gets smaller and smaller pure Farms further and further spread apart it's harder and harder to go see them to visit them with the internet it gives us connection to other [Music] Farmers I live on a dirt road and we have three kids and two dogs and 30 chickens and my hu
sband and I are always on the go we had very little access to the internet actually we could really only run like two or three devices at a time one of the only solutions we could come up with was to rent office space to split up and keep one child at home and bring one child to work hello I was Consulting with media companies in New York working remotely up here and I had a cable internet connection at my house at that point in time I was trying to upload 10 gigabytes of data for a customer pro
ject that was due and about 8 hours into the upload it failed and it was 95% complete and I even had a decent internet connection but it still wasn't good enough to be able to complete the work I needed to do we Broadband evermont is a matter of letting residents of rural areas participate in this Century's economy [Music] as you can see this is the end of the class three Road and the beginning of the class 4 Road Town doesn't plow past the driveway here the town plow makes a nice big pile of sn
ow in the middle of the road and that's it for the season if anybody shows up here they're either friends of ours or they're badly lost we've been living in this place for a long time and when we first moved in here the only options in all of this area was dial up phone service using modems the only thing it worked for was email you could send and receive email as long as you as long as nobody put an attachment on your [Music] email incumbent carriers anybody who's interested in making a big pro
fit on Internet is just not going to build to a place like this I mean look at these beautiful Hills this is an awesome place but there's not a lot of people here they were just like dude you're at the end of a dirt road we're never going to run anything up to you we are digging right now to put some underground conduit in and we're just going to follow the easement through the pole lines because this pole is very busy this was a surprise once the crews got here and looked at it to replace that
make it bigger would probably cost $20,000 so this was the far cheaper route here one of the challenges of solving the problem of connectivity in rural areas is it's not very profitable for market-based companies your Verizon your AT&T's to go in and serve such a small number of residents when you've got to run a cable line or a fiber line to a rural area you might only pass a few dozen homes and all that infrastructure is very expensive the businesses that have charge of that infrastructure and
those Services were not offering things that were available in say big cities or parts of the United States that are far more populated the telephone company for their Broadband product would only build to where there was a density um often 25 to a mile 20 to a mile we're way down we're like at 10 residences per mile commercial bodies weren't going to bother in fact they were actively disinterested I had a woman she does not have the use of her hands and she has a disabled child at home and her
telephone went out and she had just had stomach surgery she is 40 minutes away from the hospital 25 to 30 minutes away from an ambulance and so I started telling the Telecommunications CEO and I got to the end of that story and he said to me why doesn't she move why doesn't she move and I was so shocked you know the only thing I could say was don't ever say that again um but uh that lit a fire for me vermers felt like they were being left behind by these for-profit providers that was really the
message to these communities that no one is coming to save you you have to save yourself and get organized there were techies who were living out in the woods and could see what was coming and could see that where they had chosen to live the cable companies weren't going to get there if you live in a small Vermont town you are intimately familiar with the idea that nothing gets done unless the citizens lean into it our towns meet every year in March still for what we call Town Meeting day this
is bred into our DNA it is a way of governing ourselves that we depend on I stood up at the town meeting and said hey maybe we can address our lack of Internet if we get together as a community when I sat down everybody started applauding me and we discovered that various other towns had had similar Town meetings similar experiences and had the same problem that we had maybe we can solve this through multiple towns I think everyone realized yeah we're not going to get internet here if we just si
t back and wait for it that we're going to have to kind of band together to make it happen the entire country is dealing with these rural issues but Vermont has an especially difficult challenge of getting people connected because we're mountainous so Wireless doesn't work cuz it doesn't get through the hills and we're more than 80% forested so the signals have a hard time getting through foliage I come from a wireless background I I knew that that would not work with the topography that we have
it never covers everybody and it runs out of steam pretty quickly in terms of the amount of bandwidth and speed that it can provide so at that point in time the conversation shifted to the possibility of building fiber in rural areas so we at what we call boxyard which is our outdoor storage area this is where we keep reels of fiber and conduit and strand so lots of reels of fiber right here these are the different strands within this sheath so this is actually 44 strands of glass in one of the
se and you can actually expose this glass there it is just like that that's how thin just one strand of fiber is forgive me for being a recovering engineer but I got to talk about the physics a fiber the size of the human hair can carry at least 3,000 times what one cable can and as they're splitting the light and fiber they've really realized it's almost infinite the amount of data you can get down a piece of fiber the fiber technology that we were proposing would be future proof in other words
we would do it once and then there wouldn't need to be upgrades this is what makes the magic happen pretty much plug in play once it gets going you're not transmitting your information any longer by electricity you are transmitting it by a light wave that is passed at the speed of light through this fiber that's why generally your connection through fiber will be more dependable than electrical signal because electrical signal can be subject to interference green is always good and red is bad s
o see we have nothing but green light so that's always a good thing [Music] my father moved here from Massachusetts and started out not intending to be a farmer he was going to be an artist and a poet and live in an old farmhouse in Vermont and sort of fell into agriculture by growing his own food when my dad bought the original Farmhouse the power was not pulled so he called The Electric Co-op and they said yep we'll we'll be out and we'll put Power you know forgive my bias but you know I think
the electrification of Rural America was one of humankind's greatest feat oh my gosh look at that that was a substation looks like this was being constructed there's some line workers this has to be a little later cuz they did in the beginning they didn't wear hard hats no cows so when the co-op first ran electricity they ran to the milking powers of the barn it was for keeping the milk cool then people figure well this works in the house too significance of cows is that's where it all started
suddenly Farmers could produce more they could make more money they could they could distribute their product better electricity became very important for Farmers to do all sorts of things and a lot of electrical utilities covered the denser areas and did not cover the poor areas today the digital divide is the economic divide if you look at people who are on the other side of the digital divide they're more than double the number of low income as people that are connected today it really has be
come one of the most important Equity issues of the day if you think about our roads for instance we don't think in terms of we need a road over here because folks are really wealthy and over here maybe less so because they don't have as much need for it we need our roads to go everywhere it's the same thing with the [Music] internet I had a lot of doubts about whether we would ultimately be successful but I also had no alternative the doubts don't matter when there is no tomorrow if we fail our
efforts to prove that fiber to the home was viable in rural areas depended on our pre-registration efforts and that was modeled after what happened in Vermont with electricity different areas of the state formed Rural cooperatives and they would have signup efforts at Town meetings or town halls or General stores and we did exactly the same thing I think we had about a thousand people signed up without even being an organized entity because the demand for it was that great everybody wanted it w
e just weren't sure how to pay for it our select board appointed me to represent nor on the governing board of the newly created EC fiber we spent the spring and early summer of 2008 to develop a a bond issue to be marketed in the municipal bond market to the kinds of people who invest in stadium bonds and other Revenue Bond type Enterprises everything is in place and we are ready to break open the champagne because we are about to raise a lot of money in the municipal bond market and then I wak
e up on September 16th and Leman Brothers has gone bust the credit mark markets fail everything freezes we're dead there is no such thing as a municipal bond market it simply evaporated overnight I never recall anyone saying do we want to quit it was always this didn't work what are we going to do instead the idea was that we should do what Vermont typically do when people tell us it's impossible we just do it ourselves we said we can build out a fiber Network in one area of one Community using
private friends and family financing what the hell we'll have bake sales we basically went door too selling promiser notes and in that process we raised 72 million and that's the thing that got us started it really is an interesting Vermont story where else can you have a person willing to fund a network and never say why should I pay and the others benefit from it never came up and we chose Barnard so we built our Network there we got a bunch of subscribers it was so well received that other to
wns were clamoring when can we get it we were going to focus on unserved areas and unserved towns first even though the the served areas might have been more profitable because they had more homes per mile we were focused on getting service to um people that had no other alternative stord was one of the earlier towns to get EC fiber the biggest Improvement has been mostly the reliability we are in contact with our Distributors and the store almost exclusively electronically now now we can monito
r the temperature in our tanks from anywhere I was just out in Colorado and I get an alert in the morning that tells me that the bulk tank is warmer than it should be I knew that before the people who are here Ming the cows did the other big thing that we use is in our cing barn we put in cameras so we can see when a cow's cing and we can actually talk to the people that are there through the camera so if someone needs help they just call and we just show up and there's a C that needs help with
cing we can help with that Broadband communication is not simply about entertainment the commercial entities emphasize the download speed that is the speed with which data can be delivered to you we emphasize upload speed as well an emphasis on download speed is an emphasis on entertainment delivery now entertainment delivery makes profits but it doesn't make profits for the local economy it makes profits for the shareholders of communication [Music] entities you wouldn't normally look at this e
lder care home with the historic building and think boy they really need high-speed internet but once you come in the doors and you see the population and you go yeah no they do need that this right here is how I use the Internet it's uh I text a lot the residents use the internet primarily for teleconferencing with their doctors and with their families in many ways it's just like sitting around the dinner table and talking being able to interface with people outside of your small pod of uh fell
ow residents is huge you know it allows you a connection to the greater world and what we did was we have a fiber cable right here that's that orange cable right there it runs from here all the way back it connects this cabin to the rest of the world friends and and people come by here and even visitors from out of town come by here and they're always surprised that I have gigabit internet fiber in my cabin and I'm not surprised about that at all you're damn right there's going to be internet he
re in 2019 the state legislature realized wait a second EC fiber has figured out a solution to this problem we need more EC fibers in the state we've got a great model in the state of Vermont at this point how do we replicate that throughout the rest of the state cud stands for Communications Union district they are structured like a town government but it is a an entity that is specifically formed to serve a region maybe a couple dozen towns and drive connectivity Drive fiber internet service i
nto the most rural parts of those towns I frankly have long suspected that there was a tongue and cheek there because cud does seem to be related to Vermont agriculture does it the response was incredible throughout the state people coming together to start forming these cuds CB fiber is a Communications Union district in central Vermont the buildout process we have uh is very long we deal with swamps we deal with mountains you may not be able to truck in you have to use four-wheelers you have t
o use side by sides so it takes a long time there's this joke almost a joke that you can't get there from here and that's true with fiber as well so we have to be creative in how we lay our lines so what they're going to do is they're going to lash it which is a thin wire and it basically just wraps around that strand so this is one of the challenges that takes a lot of time pretty sure the Lash are stuck in the tree gets frustrating dealing with this sort of area um and most of what we build is
is it's going to be like this there's no way around it that's why nobody builds these ready we're all in Vermont used to thinking about town boundaries however foam poles have no idea they're going went across the town Bounder DB fiber got its name because the originating towns were communities in the Deerfield river valley of Vermont they are hilltowns for the most part Maro for example my town is 90 to 95% unserved we uh decided that the best path was to form a Communications Union district o
f course that's March of 2020 and uh just as Co is hitting when they couldn't together in person and had to meet virtually all of these volunteers who came together and most all of us were sitting at connections that didn't work every single meeting reinforces our AB our experience that we could do better your Frozen is one of our favorite [Music] catchphrases every cud has different personality different communities have different degrees of wanting to work with others around the state or think
ing that this is what's best for our community we are in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom also known as the ne very beautiful but also has a lot of economic challenges to overcome we have sections of road where you're driving for 10 miles at a time where we not going to see a single house in a area that is more conservative than a lot of other places and in some cases is not supportive of kind of government control of entities they had seen what private providers had fallen short on time and time aga
in and believed in their community members to solve this problem when Co hit Vermont overnight we had tens of thousands of school children that didn't have access to the classroom and then there were tens of thousands of Vermont citizens who needed access to healthcare ordering supplies or dealing with doctor's offices and then having uh the Service drop when we started rolling out high-speed Broadband we started by Design focusing on the areas that are the most unserved and underserved and unsu
rprisingly at least to me we've seen orders just pouring in we first learned about Maple broadband and we got in their ear early on and they made us a a a beta test site we also bribe them with cookies with the model of EC fiber efforts sprung up in central Vermont with CV fiber and in the Northeast Kingdom nek Broadband in the Deerfield Valley down in Windam County in the southern Vermont Cudi in Bennington County in Rutland County Addison County Northwest L Moy last year chitan County all acro
ss the state people who lived in rural areas the frustration that they felt was palpable people felt as though they were second class citizens they felt as though rural areas have been left behind they felt extremely frustrated but also now hopeful that there would be a [Music] change we are here at the callus Town Hall in a neighborhood that previously was unserved or underserved we have been hanging fiber for 10 months now and today CV fiber is celebrating the connection of its very first cust
omers here we are we're operating and we're we're hooking we're making connections for customers just the the determination day in and day out of of all these workers and Department building Community to solve a problem that is the Vermont way just having a town office that has internet that's why I like calling the community Broadband networks these aren't just fiber networks these are Community Networks they're building Community they're building capital and resources and new opportunities for
communities and the community is doing it themselves are they made it happen you made it happen so congratulations 3 2 1 Vermont is quite exceptional in what we're trying to do we're the only state in the Union that's getting every address connected to Fiber Optic internet there is a lot more to be done both on the construction phase there's more funds to raise the federal government's providing some additional funding via the Broadband Equity access and deployment act beid but that like any fe
deral funding comes with strings attached and then even once this network is built we're not done we we talk a lot about remote work education tella health no this is about Equity this is about being able to participate in your Community very often we talk about connecting the unconnected and what we generally mean by that is bringing coverage or bringing availability to areas that are historically unserved or underserved but there's another aspect as well which is very important which is the eq
uity portion because not everyone can afford highspeed Broadband people can't afford highspeed Broadband then the fact that there's fiber going down the road or there's cable going out past their house doesn't actually help if they're not able to pay pay their bills I think it's really important as we think about building out Broadband in Vermont that we don't leave anyone behind and people with disabilities are often Left Behind they are the largest community of people that experience significa
nt disparities in employment Health housing all of those big important factors in life right so it's really important that we think about that Community when we're building out our broadband I felt that it was super important to be able to be in my community where I grew up and where I have Deep Roots but also do the work that I love to do and find an opportunity to do it here but we have more than double the size of pretty much every single other district and we're more rural we have a much mor
e expensive Network to build because of that and and we have Victory Vermont which was one of the last places in the United States to get electricity and that's a place where we're going to be building fiber in the next couple of years you know when I was the CEO of ront electric cop I had a picture in my office it was the first Cooperative poll that was set in Vermont in 1939 in Eden Mills and there was men women and children pushing that pole up and I thought wouldn't it be wonderful to be abl
e to live in those times when people were doing such important work collectively to Electrify Rural America I wonder if he's George Ain is standing in front of that first pole see it says October 26 1938 oh says liines engaged May 6th 1939 that was the poll the picture I had in my office 1939 look at that wow this is the largest construction project since probably since Ro electri ification or the building of the highway system when it comes to what what's been happening in [Music] Vermont the d
ay when the White River Junction Hub would officially go into service TR name EC fiber finally finally after all this time after all this work I wanted to make sure that a lot of the people who were involed evolved originally that they had an opportunity to be recognized from the Inception of this idea until this year 17 years it took us to get to the point where we had finally built out the last piece of the network it's the last piece of an incredible journey and an incredible vision and 17 ye
ars of hard hard work by so many different people I wanted to have a band I wanted it to be kind of a real Americana type event that had a band there like let's make this a real celebration it was over the top but sometimes you need to be over the top we've been told that we're doing the impossible and when we succeed doing the impossible we have to [Music] celebrate all right it is really it's my uh great great pleasure to introduce our keynote [Music] speaker they were audacious enough to beli
eve that they could indeed create a Broadband Network that would compete against the existing cable and telecom companies it's been the highlight of my communications career because you know I earned a good amount of money in my for-profit part of it but this has been much more gratifying because it really has had an impact I asked first thing I did was I asked my wife to get off the couch and I pulled all the cushions off the couch and she said David what are you doing I said I'm raising money
for EC fiber and uh want to introduce to you my friend Laredo [Applause] it is such a treat to be here today I spent a lot of time developing kind of a script for the day and I wanted to make it you know pretty Snappy so that we would hold people's attention and I'll never forget I'm sitting there and I'm looking at my script and I'm trying to give the speaker uh okay you know you've had your minute and a half you know get off the stage and we're all set and then the credit markets melt down jus
t hold on FX I'm going to finish up in a second but you got to give me time all right but suddenly there was a change in the room and the change was that people were silent people were absorbed people were hanging on every word and at after that I only looked at the script to see who the next speaker was going to be that I was going to introduce and I just let them tell their story it just played out so beautifully but I just want to say that this moment is one of the happiest moments of my life
you are I went to that celebration and boy did I have a good time it was it was a dream come true true it was [Music] awesome that felt somehow cathartic 15 years later all the work that local community leaders in a couple of dozen towns around the Upper Valley had done to set the stage for cuds forming all over the state my high school vice principal someone who works for one of the utilities another person who's a teacher these are the people that came together to form these cuds and say okay
we're going to do it I mean it's really a testament to vermonter just in general makes me emotional to think [Music] about the EC fiber a success it was a perfect really Vermont model of people getting things done that seemed impossible but by putting many many people together they were able to be successful there really is no alternative if you want to live and raise a family and be a community in rural Vermont unless we do this together because relying on private Enterprise they've already we
ighed in and said no thank you folks find some other place to live well I want to live here these Hills are beautiful just look around why would I want to be anywhere [Music] [Music] else [Music] [Music]
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