GREENFIELD — For some Greenfield residents, the long-awaited municipal broadband service that promises faster internet speeds and lower prices than commercial competitors is just around the corner.
With half of a townwide fiber optic build-out nearly complete, Greenfield Community Energy and Technology plans to launch the service within the coming weeks, according to interim General Manager Daniel Kelley. All residents and businesses will be able to sign up for the service, which will only be available in the downtown urban area at first. From there, GCET will manage the rest of the build-out based on demand.
GCET plans to make a formal announcement about the launch of service within the next month. At that time, it will specify which areas of town will be able to get online first.
“We’ve been very aggressive in our build-out for the past three months, despite the fact that it’s winter, despite the fact that there is a huge shortage of fiber,” Kelley said. “What we’ve done is we’ve built our core fiber network, so that’s in place now.”
GCET has been hanging fiber optic cables on utility poles across town and installing 300 access nodes that will bathe Greenfield in a Wi-Fi network. Instead of running fiber directly to homes and business from the poles — which has been the traditional “fiber to the premises” model — the access nodes will send a secure signal to special receivers on customers’ homes.
Kelley said the receivers are 5 inches long and weigh less than a pound. They have an ethernet cable that runs inside the home and plugs into a special router.
“It’s a very small device, unintrusive. If we hang it under the eve of your house it won’t even be seen,” he said.
The network’s hybrid fiber/wireless design will still allow customers to set up private networks in their own homes and businesses, and GCET has selected special routers that allow remote diagnostics from the GCET office on Main Street.
The wireless “blanket” created by the access nodes will also allow customers to connect to the Wi-Fi network anywhere in Greenfield, turning the 24-square-mile town into one large hotspot for subscribers. GCET plans to offer a less expensive per-device mobile plan in addition to Internet plans for homes and businesses.
The service has not announced its price structure yet, but Lee Frankl, who is leading the sales and marketing effort, said it will be competitive with commercial providers.
GCET will also provide faster internet speeds than traditional providers, with a fully scalable network that’s capable of speeds up to 100 gigabits per second. Right now, Kelley said the network is set at 10 gigabits per second.
Unlike traditional internet providers, GCET will offer upload speeds that are the same as its download speeds, which Kelley said will be a big advantage for businesses, as everything is moving toward a cloud-based system. With providers like Comcast, upload speeds are slower than download speeds in Greenfield.
Kelley said GCET’s standard menu for residental customers includes a 30 megabits per second (Mbps) plan, a 75 Mbps plan and a 150 Mbps plan.
Because each one of the 300 access nodes is a fiber interconnection point, GCET will also be able to run fiber directly to businesses that may need a direct connection for a variety of reasons, instead of using the wireless transmitters.
Scot Broderick, a video producer and editor who owns LightSpeed Productions Inc. on Main Street, has been beta testing GCET’s internet over the past two months. After getting set up with a wireless receiver, Broderick said the transition was seamless.
“I had and still have my Comcast account, which is a medium speed account, and there’s just no comparison, (GCET) is tremendously faster,” he said.
Broderick said he’d been keeping tabs on the service since he first heard about it, and signed up to be a beta tester when that option became available.
As a filmmaker, Broderick said he has to upload and download huge files. Recently, he had to download close to a terabyte of movie material, which used to take him the better part of a day. With GCET, he said it only took a few hours.
“Just yesterday I had to upload about 50 gigabytes of movies, and it just seemed like it went up so fast compared to the past,” he said. “Anyone that’s working in video or any medium that requires really huge files, this is a great boon.”
The municipal broadband service is also hoping to be a resource for residents who want to cut the cord completely from their cable provider.
“The future is internet-based television,” Frankl said. “GCET is going to offer, at minimum, good resources for people who want to cut the cord entirely with their cable company.”
Kelley said the townwide fiber build-out will be 50 percent complete within the next month. A core fiber network is already in place, with three “brain centers” — one at town hall, and the other two at each end of the opposite sides of town, forming a triangle.
“We designed it like that so if there’s a fiber cut or some sort of disaster, we can keep it up and running,” Kelley said.
Eventually, every resident will have access to the service.
The 300 fiber interconnection points will also allow Greenfield to expand the service to neighboring towns. Kelley said GCET has been working closely with the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, which has been working to bring broadband to the remaining unserved and partially served towns in the state.
He said getting other towns hooked up to the network would take more than a year because of the construction that would have to happen.
“There are state officials that are very excited about what’s happening in Greenfield because there are technological and operational models here that could benefit all of these long suffering towns after Greenfield is taken care of,” Frankl added.
In September, GCET moved into its new office above TD Bank on Main Street, where its staff of 10 has been preparing for the official launch. Once the service goes live, Kelley said more employees will be hired. He expects to add 15 to 20 new staff members over the next year.
GCET has run into trouble finding network engineers because the job requires a specific skill set, according to Kelley. He said anyone interested in the job can find more information online at gcet.net.
At this point, Kelley said the greatest unknown is how many customers will sign up for the service after the launch date. GCET plans to send a newsletter out to more than 1,000 residents who have already expressed interest through its website and the free GreenLight pilot program, which will be phased out as the paid service comes online.
Financially, Kelley said GCET is doing well.
“We’ve come in way under budget on our builds,” he said.
The entity is ratepayer-funded, meaning it’s supported by customers rather than taxpayers. In November 2015, 82.5 percent of Greenfield voters approved the formation of GCET, whose mission is to “provide every resident and business with the bandwidth they need, on any device, whatever their location, at no cost to taxpayers.”
In April 2016, Town Council voted to borrow $5 million to establish the municipal telecommunications system, which will be paid back from revenue derived from the service’s users.
Broderick said he plans to pay for the service at his editing suite on Main Street after the public launch, and hopes to see it succeed economically.
“I’m really appreciative of the town of Greenfield taking this issue by the horns and saying, ‘We’re going to do something for both the residents and businesses in town,’ and I think this is great leadership,” he said.
You can reach Aviva Luttrell at: aluttrell@recorder.com
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