Hooray! The Recorder reports that the state’s pathetic bureaucracy, the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, has finally succeeded in forcing $4 million into the hands of Comcast for cable in some of the unserved areas of nine towns.
Mission Accomplished!
But wait, let’s look at some past anniversaries of this failed effort. Eight years ago, the state founded MBI to achieve “ubiquitous broadband” in western Mass. Five years later, they had built a “Bridge to Nowhere,” a fiber superhighway to which not a single home had access.
In the three additional years since then, the state put up $50 million to complete the “last mile” to residents. Still, nobody is connected.
A year ago, MBI declared Comcast the only qualified entity to build out Buckland, already partially served. In a year’s “negotiations” since then, MBI apparently shoved all the money across the table to Comcast, then begged them to agree to hook up some of the homes.
But MBI is hungry, taking $5 million up-front of the $50 million allocation for its staff and recently grabbing another $1 million out of what had been $5 million for the Comcast job. A bureaucrat’s gotta eat, right?
At the Mission Accomplished briefing this week, we hear that it will be another two years or so for broadband in 96 percent of the partially served towns. Hundreds of homes will remain unserved, but MBI needed that $1 million for itself, and Comcast was no help, saving its billions for a buyout of Dreamworks Animation.
So maybe in 2018, 10 years since the charter of MBI, there will be some results. Look out Third World countries, here comes western Massachusetts!
Jim Wagener
Buckland