Last night, at the Town’s first budget session for our upcoming fiscal budget, I requested a line item in the amount of $500,000 for a fiber broadband rollout pilot in Centreville.
As a part of the recently approved Federal Stimulus Bill (America Rescue Plan Act of 2021), local governments will receive funds to help rebuild Main Street economies. In total, Centreville is forecasted to receive $4.1 million in funding.
One of the specific uses of this funding is to make necessary investments in Broadband. Reliable high-speed fiber broadband is one of the most important communication tools to ensure economic vitality and ensure stable property values, more especially for rural communities.
With this additional stimulus funding, Centreville should be able to address our long list of deferred water and sewer capital needs AND provide for fiber broadband. Tax cuts are specifically prohibited in the federal stimulus enabling legislation.
How would this work?
Neighborhoods like Northbrook were designed with a utility easement to allow for relatively simple installation of fiber. This has enabled for-profit providers like Talkie Communications to install fiber in the underground utility right-of-way in Northbrook. Many households in Northbrook are already accessing Gigabit speed through Talkie.
Not all neighborhoods in Centreville have these underground utility easements, which makes fiber installation potentially more expensive in those areas. In the absence of a utility easement, access typically needs to occur above ground on existing telephone/power poles. This requires lease agreements with the pole owners, and in some cases, replacement of poles. Plus, in many of our original neighborhoods, the houses are further apart, increasing the installation cost and potentially reducing the profitability in the installation of fiber.
By providing funding for an open-access network in locations where a for-profit company may select to install fiber last due to the increased costs to install, we should be able to have households in our original or older neighborhoods connected to fiber in parallel with those neighborhoods with underground utility easements. Then, users can choose which service provider to purchase their internet from. Non profits like Maryland Rural Broadband already have use agreements with the telephone pole owners to install fiber on their utility poles and their mission is to enable broadband in rural communities that might not be served by traditional service providers.
There are many Maryland municipalities who have taken this approach, and it is my hope that by using some of this stimulus funding for this purpose, we can bring all of Centreville into the 21st century.
The next step would be to have the Council include this in the upcoming budget, and then have a non-profit provider do an analysis of the various neighborhoods in Centreville where this could be most effective and to see how far the initial funding proposal will go.
I am hopeful that this can become a reality and please feel free to contact me at 443.262.5729 if you have any questions.
