By a unanimous vote of its board of directors, the Massachusetts Broadband Institute can now move forward with negotiations for Comcast to build out broadband expansions in seven “partially served” towns where Comcast now provides limited broadband service.
Within Franklin County, these towns are Buckland, Shelburne, Conway and Northfield. The other partially served towns awaiting Comcast expansion are Pelham, Huntington and Chester.
The Massachusetts Broadband Institute has been charged with overseeing completion of “last-mile” high-speed broadband in towns with such low populations — or such challenging terrain — that they were not deemed profitable enough for commercial purveyors of high-speed Internet.
About three dozen “unserved” communities have no high-speed broadband access, but those towns where Comcast already provides some high-speed Internet have hopes that Comcast will extend its cable lines within the town borders to provide Internet access to roughly 96 percent of all households.
In February, MBI held meetings with the selectboards and broadband committees to spell out expansion offers from Comcast and to get feedback from town officials. The reply from most of the town officials was “how soon can we have broadband?”
In February, MBI said Comcast had offered to extend cable to 98 percent of Conway, which has cable access for about 74 percent of its households.
For Shelburne, Comcast offered to expand its cable broadband access to about 94 percent of the town’s households and businesses.
According to MBI, Comcast has offered to add cable access to another 77 households in Buckland — bringing access to 96.6 percent of that town.
“It’s good news that this project is going to move forward,” said Glenn Cardinal, chairman of Buckland’s Cable Advisory Committee. Hopefully, we can see some of these homes connected for the 2016 construction season.”
In Northfield, as reported by MBI, Comcast plans to expand its cable service to about 97 percent of the homes and businesses. However, some of Comcast’s numbers have been questioned by the town’s Electronic Communications Committee, according to Chairman Brian Brault.
Town officials were eager to see the make-ready work begin as soon as possible. They hoped that work would include pole surveys, negotiations to use utility poles owned by other utilities, and putting up cable this construction season.
The state allocated $5 million out of its $50 million last-mile broadband fund to be used to leverage a cable build-out of the partially served towns by commercial providers, such as Comcast. Comcast was the only responder to MBI’s request for queries for build-out of these seven towns.
In the letter to town officials, Christine Hatch of MBI said she will keep towns informed as the schedule for negotiations becomes more definite. “We know the demand for this work to start is strong,” she wrote, “and we will be doing everything we can to start the negotiations as quickly as possible.”