Speaker 1: Yesterday we talked about the billions of dollars US states
Speaker 1: and the federal government are pouring into training workers for
Speaker 1: new economy jobs like making batteries to power electric vehicles.
Speaker 1: It's all part of a massive push to boost the
Speaker 1: economy and revive US manufacturing and of course, to keep
Speaker 1: up with China. Today we take a look at another
Speaker 1: huge pot of money.
Speaker 2: Kammon and I are make an equally historic investment connect
Speaker 2: everyone in America. Everyone in America the high speed Internet.
Speaker 2: We're announcing over forty billion dollars to be distributed to
Speaker 2: fifty states, Washington, DC and territories to deliver high speed
Speaker 2: in it a place where there's neither service or it's
Speaker 2: too slow.
Speaker 1: About seven percent of US households and businesses lack basic
Speaker 1: broadband Internet. Bloomberg's Todd Shields is here to tell us
Speaker 1: how the federal money is being spent and who it'll help.
Speaker 3: We need broadband to participate in daily life now, which
Speaker 3: is increasingly true every year. Online applications for jobs, for
Speaker 3: job listings, for government for benefits for work, as we
Speaker 3: all discovered during the pandemic, for schooling as we discovered
Speaker 3: during the pandemic, and a.
Speaker 1: Bit later in the show, one State's ambitious plan to
Speaker 1: wire itself for the future.
Speaker 4: Well, right now, Vermont is fifth from the bottom in
Speaker 4: terms of states in terms of internet performance.
Speaker 5: When we're done, we'll be number one.
Speaker 4: No other state has set a goal to get fiber
Speaker 4: optic internet to every address.
Speaker 1: I'm Westksova today on the big take closing America's digital divide. Todd,
Speaker 1: how long have you been covering the telecommunications industry? Now?
Speaker 3: About twenty years now, maybe a little over that.
Speaker 1: So you've seen big programs come and go, But this
Speaker 1: one's pretty big. Forty two billion dollars for broadband internet
Speaker 1: around the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the biggest funding in one single slug. Although
Speaker 3: the FEDS push money at broadband every year in various forms.
Speaker 3: There's an ongoing nine billion dollar program. There was a
Speaker 3: twenty billion dollar auction to build wireless facilities wireless broadband,
Speaker 3: which didn't do too well. And this is an attempt
Speaker 3: to once and for all fill in the gaps left
Speaker 3: by all those other programs.
Speaker 1: What's the difference between broadband and not broadband?
Speaker 3: You know, it's like, what was it justice the potter
Speaker 3: who said that he knows at about obscenity. You know
Speaker 3: it when you see it. If you're using your Internet
Speaker 3: and it's bulkying and it's slow and it's cruddy, and
Speaker 3: the video stops and you can't download your kids homework,
Speaker 3: you probably don't have broadband. But there are some numbers
Speaker 3: behind it too. For many years now, I think since
Speaker 3: about twenty twelve, the definition by the Federal Communications Commission
Speaker 3: for broadband has been twenty five to three twenty five
Speaker 3: slash three able to download twenty five megabits per second
Speaker 3: upload three. That's widely criticized. It's too slow and not meaning.
Speaker 3: Many applications demand more. If you have multiple users in
Speaker 3: a household, you'll clog up fast with twenty five to
Speaker 3: three connection.
Speaker 1: It's pretty common these days just to have two hundred,
Speaker 1: three hundred.
Speaker 3: And four exactly exactly. So now we get to the
Speaker 3: bad program, and that stands for the Broadband Equity, Access
Speaker 3: and Deployment Program, the big forty two billion dollar program,
Speaker 3: and the requirement there is one hundred, twenty one hundred
Speaker 3: down twenty up. Is what is going to be happening
Speaker 3: with the bad program? Well, first of all, they're going
Speaker 3: to fund places that lack old fashioned twenty five to three.
Speaker 3: But the speed they're looking for to acquire bid grant funding,
Speaker 3: if you take that money as a subsidy, if you
Speaker 3: use bid grant money to subsidize your construction, you must
Speaker 3: deliver one hundred and twenty one hundred megabits down twenty
Speaker 3: up on the premise that that's what broadband is today,
Speaker 3: that's where the line is today, that's how fast it
Speaker 3: has to be to be useful to all households.
Speaker 1: So they announced us in June forty two billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us how does it work?
Speaker 3: What happened was Congress in twenty twenty one, when they're
Speaker 3: passing a lot of big spending bills, passed a very
Speaker 3: large bill known colloquially as the Infrastructure Bill, and it
Speaker 3: included this forty two billion dollar program for broadband. They've
Speaker 3: spent a time since late twenty twenty one devising the program,
Speaker 3: including a new fangled attempt to figure out where exactly
Speaker 3: the need is. And we can talk about that what
Speaker 3: the problem was with the previous attempts. But the Federal
Speaker 3: Communications Commission worked hard to try to get a better
Speaker 3: picture of where we need to spend money to close
Speaker 3: the so called digital divide.
Speaker 1: And how many Americans who don't have service now or
Speaker 1: have really slow service are going to benefit from this
Speaker 1: new program.
Speaker 3: Well ballpark, about ten or sixteen million homes will have
Speaker 3: new or improved service for this. About ten million homes
Speaker 3: are unserved right now by the definition that we're using,
Speaker 3: and four and a half million are underserved, meaning they
Speaker 3: have kruddy Internet that could deserve an upgrade. So sixteen
Speaker 3: million homes. How many people? So when each house? I
Speaker 3: don't know, but that sounds to me like forty sixty
Speaker 3: million Americans or more. It's a considerable number. Broadband. Over
Speaker 3: the years I've covered it has moved from being something
Speaker 3: that could sometimes be treated as a luxury. In fact,
Speaker 3: one former FCC chairman got into trouble for replying to
Speaker 3: questions about the digital divide by saying.
Speaker 6: You know, I think there's a Mercedes divide. I'd like
Speaker 6: to have one I can't afford. I'm not meaning to
Speaker 6: be completely flipped about it, because I think it's important
Speaker 6: social issue, but it shouldn't be used to justify the
Speaker 6: notion of essentially the socialization of the deployment of the infrastructure.
Speaker 6: Because what I get afraid of is that there is
Speaker 6: a real risk. Consequence to that is if you force
Speaker 6: if the standard is you can't have it. You can't
Speaker 6: produce it unless you produce it. For all always, I'm
Speaker 6: very worried it doesn't get produced.
Speaker 1: That was Michael Powell speaking at his first news conference
Speaker 1: as FCC chair in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3: That kind of rhetoric is long long gone. Everybody knows
Speaker 3: it's a necessity. We've got this big chunk of money
Speaker 3: to try to, if you will, supply the missing bits
Speaker 3: of knitting so that everybody in the country has it.
Speaker 1: So let's dig into the big question that you raised
Speaker 1: at the top there, which is how do you figure
Speaker 1: out where it's most needed? Where is it most needed?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a sort of a gnarly question. So
Speaker 3: with broadband, you run fiber or a line down a neighborhood,
Speaker 3: and in cities or in suburbs, you get you know,
Speaker 3: pick your number per mile, dozens, hundreds, a lot of
Speaker 3: connections that you can then sell service to to cover
Speaker 3: the cost of your operation. Out in the countryside, you
Speaker 3: run a line down a country road, maybe you get
Speaker 3: a home every mile, maybe a home every five miles.
Speaker 3: In places like Montana, even less at Alaska, so it
Speaker 3: becomes prohibitively expensive to provide service via a wire There
Speaker 3: have been attempts to provide service via wireless, that too
Speaker 3: runs into problems because all the wireless areervices rely on
Speaker 3: wires in the ground, usually fiber. It comes out of
Speaker 3: a tower. At the base of the tower is a
Speaker 3: fiber connecting it to the backbones of the Internet. So
Speaker 3: you can't just put a wireless tower out there in
Speaker 3: the middle of nowhere. It's got to have something coming
Speaker 3: out of the base. So even a wireless solution is
Speaker 3: a way to lower the cost. You don't have to
Speaker 3: run wires everywhere and buy rights away and dig cable,
Speaker 3: but it's not the solution. To figure out where service
Speaker 3: is needed. The Federal Communications Commission for a long time
Speaker 3: used a method where they would just ask providers, do
Speaker 3: you provide service in a certain census block? One home
Speaker 3: in the block, the color in the whole block is served. This,
Speaker 3: of course overstated how many places were served. The understated
Speaker 3: how many didn't have service, leading to a lot of guesswork.
Speaker 1: And this was a way that the industry could sort
Speaker 1: of make it look like they provided broader service than
Speaker 1: they actually did.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, it did two things. It overstated the service
Speaker 3: they did so they provide us. So from a pr standpoint,
Speaker 3: that's good, we serve the watch am a call at valley,
Speaker 3: We're great. It also had the effects since subsidies are
Speaker 3: aimed at areas. Historically, they're aimed at areas without adequate service.
Speaker 3: If you say I serve you know, West whatever town,
Speaker 3: subsidies won't come in there. So a competitor won't be
Speaker 3: using federal or state dollars to build where you already
Speaker 3: have service that may or may not be good and
Speaker 3: may or may not be extended to everybody. So there
Speaker 3: is an incentive built in there for the companies to
Speaker 3: overclaim their service. Let's say they have an area that
Speaker 3: only half the homes are served, find a way to
Speaker 3: color them all served. No competitor can come in with
Speaker 3: federal money and use the federal money to serve the
Speaker 3: remaining half that you don't, And.
Speaker 1: So once they build it, a competitor can't use that
Speaker 1: same wire.
Speaker 3: Correct, it's a federal subsidy. It's not the federal government
Speaker 3: that pays to put down the lines. The federal government
Speaker 3: helps the private companies and they can be very big companies,
Speaker 3: such as AT and T and Verizon and Comcast and Charter,
Speaker 3: the latter two being cable companies. The federal government provides
Speaker 3: subsidies that those companies then use to defray the cost
Speaker 3: of building lines. And the argument is, if the marginal
Speaker 3: cost of pushing out of a concentrated area where there's
Speaker 3: lots of customers, you can use the subsidy to defray
Speaker 3: the marginal cost. So they make it worthwhile to get
Speaker 3: some edge areas that were not worthwhile from a straight
Speaker 3: profit and lost standpoint before the subsidy.
Speaker 1: They got to divvy up all this money, and my
Speaker 1: guess is not every state's going to get the same amount.
Speaker 3: Oh no, there are big differences between what the states get.
Speaker 3: The leaders are places like California and Texas. Texas is
Speaker 3: getting over three billion, California is getting over a billion. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: Missouri is I believe, in number three place with over
Speaker 3: a billion. And what happens is they count the number
Speaker 3: of locations deemed by the Federal Communications Commission to be
Speaker 3: unserved in the first place. Then they find to have
Speaker 3: a formula between the fifty states to deliver the money.
Speaker 3: Every state gets at least one hundred million. I know that.
Speaker 3: But if you're a big state with a lot of
Speaker 3: people without service, you get more money than a little
Speaker 3: state that's pretty well covered with service. How did they.
Speaker 1: Decide, like, how do they actually know where the people
Speaker 1: are who most needed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so here's where we get into what's known as
Speaker 3: the broadband map produced by the FCC. They said, no,
Speaker 3: we're gonna do better. We're gonna go and this is
Speaker 3: the Director of Congress in the big twenty twenty one legislation.
Speaker 3: They said, we're going to go ahead and have you
Speaker 3: report your service at every basically almost structure in the US.
Speaker 3: The jargon is broadband serviceable location. So a home would
Speaker 3: be that, a gas station would be that, an outbuilding
Speaker 3: such as a barn probably wouldn't be. But broadly speaking,
Speaker 3: it's like any place where you could expect to find
Speaker 3: internet service. Now, the downside of that is an apartment
Speaker 3: building is one broadband serviceable location. There might be you know,
Speaker 3: one hundred apartments in there, all of which it's one
Speaker 3: hundred homes, but just one location. But give it all that.
Speaker 3: The analysts have tried to figure out exactly how to
Speaker 3: bring all that out in the wash. Now, the FCC
Speaker 3: has a map. You can see dots on the map.
Speaker 3: You can zoom into your neighborhood and see what service
Speaker 3: is purported to be offered at your house or your address.
Speaker 3: So you take that data and put it in a
Speaker 3: spreadsheet and combine it with available funding and mix it around,
Speaker 3: and you come up with the grants announced June thirtieth,
Speaker 3: the state by state grants. What happens now is the
Speaker 3: states have till December to devise their plans and get
Speaker 3: an initial Oh that's good, No, it isn't, and then
Speaker 3: some of the money may start flowing by next spring.
Speaker 1: After the break. Can the US build new broadband infrastructure
Speaker 1: with only American made parts?
Speaker 3: So tied?
Speaker 1: You talked about how these providers now have to meet
Speaker 1: increased standards for broadband speed in order to get this money.
Speaker 1: What's involved in building this level of broadband? Is it
Speaker 1: harder to build faster lines than slower lines? What kind
Speaker 1: of equipment is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, here we get into yet another argument in
Speaker 3: this area. The one word answer to what is involved
Speaker 3: is fiber. Fiber is fast. It's like a glass cable
Speaker 3: if you will, that fancy moves it to speed of light.
Speaker 3: Is resistant to deterioration, It won't rust, it won't usually
Speaker 3: not break. Fiber is also seen as very adaptable. The
Speaker 3: signal travels far. When you want to upgrade fiber, you
Speaker 3: just need to upgrade the gadgets, the electronics every I
Speaker 3: don't know, half mile mile that you don't have to
Speaker 3: come back in a lot of places in the network.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of future proofed in a way that
Speaker 1: as the equipment itself gets faster and faster, the fiber
Speaker 1: cable can handle all that increase speed.
Speaker 3: That is exactly correct, So that gives fiber a huge
Speaker 3: leg up. And the NTIA, the Commerce Department unit the
Speaker 3: National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration, favors fiber in the deployments
Speaker 3: the way they have written the rules for the BEAD program.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, in President Biden State of the Union,
Speaker 1: he made a really big deal in talking about this
Speaker 1: that they were going to buy American for all this equipment.
Speaker 2: And when we do these projects, and again I get
Speaker 2: criticized this, I make no excuses for it. We're going
Speaker 2: to buy American, We're going to buy American parks.
Speaker 1: Is it possible actually to build an entirely American made
Speaker 1: system with no foreign parts.
Speaker 3: It's probably not possible with no foreign parts. The question
Speaker 3: becomes will the government grant a waiver to allow some
Speaker 3: foreign parts, and if so, how many? And part of
Speaker 3: this is the buy American thing, and part of it
Speaker 3: is rivalry with China, which operates on many levels. There's
Speaker 3: worries about the security for electronic parts used in China,
Speaker 3: especially in the wireless networks. And then there's old fashioned
Speaker 3: we should buy it in America to get the jobs,
Speaker 3: to get the exports. That issue, as far as I know,
Speaker 3: hangs in the balance. The infrastructure companies have all said, geez,
Speaker 3: we're in a tough spot here. You'll want this fast,
Speaker 3: but we can't do it fast without foreign parts. Can
Speaker 3: you please give us a waiver? And the waivers hanging fire.
Speaker 3: We don't know how big it's going to be, what
Speaker 3: it'll cover, So that issue awaits It'd be hard to
Speaker 3: believe that they'd let the whole program founder on that requirement.
Speaker 3: I would think creative minds will find a way to
Speaker 3: have a waiver that lets it go for without giving
Speaker 3: away too much of the buy America store.
Speaker 1: So expanding broadband to millions more Americans than have it
Speaker 1: now is also going to be a pretty big opportunity
Speaker 1: for all of these broadband providers. So who stands to
Speaker 1: make the most, especially because in some areas, individual providers
Speaker 1: are essentially going to corner the market.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's kind of the way it goes, right.
Speaker 3: These providers have what's known as a footprint. It's where
Speaker 3: you provide service, and competing providers historically are reluctant to
Speaker 3: come into your footprint because think about it, even if
Speaker 3: you have forty percent of the homes in a footprint,
Speaker 3: the guy who's coming in, the next person, the next
Speaker 3: company in, will have to either fight for your customers
Speaker 3: or serve just the other part, the other half of
Speaker 3: sixty percent of the market. So the incentive to come
Speaker 3: into somebody else's footprint is not as great as finding
Speaker 3: greenfields if you wear where there's no good service. So
Speaker 3: all that said, there will be opportunities within the provider's
Speaker 3: footprints to fill in areas that subdivision that was missed
Speaker 3: for some reason, that little town over the hill that
Speaker 3: we didn't run the line across the mountain to that
Speaker 3: kind of stuff. So there will be those opportunities for
Speaker 3: the big providers and folks on Wall Street to Crunt
Speaker 3: some numbers, and the ones I read most often are
Speaker 3: AT and T. Verizon and Frontier are the big traditional
Speaker 3: telephone operators that may make some money off of this.
Speaker 3: In cable land, Charter especially has been an eager participant
Speaker 3: in the federal programs. Charters the number two US cable provider,
Speaker 3: and there are some thoughts that Comcast won't leave this
Speaker 3: money on the table. You might as well assigned some
Speaker 3: officers to at least look right. And there's b billions
Speaker 3: out there.
Speaker 1: So for some of the people who will be receiving
Speaker 1: the service for the first time, of course this is
Speaker 1: a great thing, but it also means that they have
Speaker 1: one provider and there isn't the kind of competition you
Speaker 1: have in more densely populated areas where you can choose
Speaker 1: between say Exfinity and Horizon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so no, there would be no price controls if
Speaker 3: that's where you're going.
Speaker 1: Has the government set requirements about how much these providers
Speaker 1: can charge or don't they charge anything they want?
Speaker 3: Not that I know of. There's some competition out there
Speaker 3: that doesn't count for in terms of BIAD grants. You know,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk is out there. There are satellite providers that
Speaker 3: will offer service that's expensive and a little bit bulky.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe the limiting factor is they either
Speaker 3: do or don't take the service. You need a certain
Speaker 3: take uprate to make money off of it. But that
Speaker 3: hasn't been a big feature in the debate. That's interesting
Speaker 3: to me that hasn't been.
Speaker 1: Obviously, we have a twenty twenty four presidential campaign heating up,
Speaker 1: and Joe Biden is going around the country touting this
Speaker 1: build Back, Better Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, all of
Speaker 1: this money, but kind of everybody wants.
Speaker 3: Credit for this thing. Yes, it's interesting. The Republicans who
Speaker 3: voted against the big broadband bill are putting out press
Speaker 3: releases saying, hey, this is great. We're getting federal broadband
Speaker 3: dollars in the millions for our state, and now we'll
Speaker 3: bring broadband to you. This is a wonderful thing. Now
Speaker 3: I can mount a defense of that. Gee, the bill
Speaker 3: was too big and I would have voted for it
Speaker 3: just the broadband proposals alone. Or were they sticking a
Speaker 3: finger in Biden's eye in twenty twenty one and want
Speaker 3: everybody to forget about it now? You know, I don't
Speaker 3: know that you could spend that a number of different ways,
Speaker 3: but anyhow, that's what's going on. Everybody's saying this is great.
Speaker 1: How does this fit into Biden's larger I guess you'd
Speaker 1: call it an industrial policy about jobs and bringing manufacturing
Speaker 1: back to the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He has been talking about broadband almost from day
Speaker 3: one in the context of these larger programs, trying to
Speaker 3: do things like bring bills under control. I know the
Speaker 3: SEC is just moving a proposal, for instance, to have
Speaker 3: cable state clearly price so that you know what the
Speaker 3: fees are. It's a kind of a consumer empowerment thing
Speaker 3: that was pushed by the White House. The Biden administration
Speaker 3: has been working broadly to increase consumer knowledge about communications
Speaker 3: products and to reduce bills.
Speaker 1: So todd the money has been set aside. The companies
Speaker 1: are getting ready to start building new connections all around
Speaker 1: the country. How long until we actually start to see
Speaker 1: homes getting this service?
Speaker 3: Late twenty twenty four, I imagine, is the first time you'll
Speaker 3: see fruits of this in the terms of somebody's home
Speaker 3: gets lit up for the first time. I think it's
Speaker 3: a five year plan for spending all the money, So
Speaker 3: beginning in twenty twenty four and rolling forward from there.
Speaker 3: So it'll take a little while past the next presidential
Speaker 3: election as for sure, but you can imagine there's some
Speaker 3: urgency to start putting some shovels in the ground before
Speaker 3: the next election.
Speaker 1: Todd, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: You are quite welcome.
Speaker 1: When we come back. Vermonth's plan to wire every house
Speaker 1: in the state for a high speed Internet. I wanted
Speaker 1: to find out how states are preparing to spend all
Speaker 1: this federal money, so I asked Christine Halquist. She's the
Speaker 1: executive director of a government body called the Vermont Community
Speaker 1: Broadband Board. Halquist has a big goal for the state's
Speaker 1: broadband rule out.
Speaker 4: Our goal, which was set out by our legislature a
Speaker 4: couple of years ago, was to get to one hundred
Speaker 4: percent of our addresses connected to fiber optic Internet. It's
Speaker 4: a bold goal where a little state, six hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty seven thousand people we can achieve those bold goals.
Speaker 1: We've been talking all about the digital divide across the US,
Speaker 1: and what does that look like specifically in Vermont. What
Speaker 1: communities are most in need of getting this upgrade to
Speaker 1: broadband service.
Speaker 4: I will say that Vermont is probably very typical of
Speaker 4: rural America. You know, if you look at folks that
Speaker 4: aren't connected today, they're from the far flung towns that
Speaker 4: have lower densities, that really never had a business case
Speaker 4: for the private providers to come in. So with that,
Speaker 4: it represents a much higher percentage of low income folks.
Speaker 5: If you look at.
Speaker 4: The area served today versus not service, it's about double
Speaker 4: the number of low income folks. It isn't just about
Speaker 4: getting people connected, it's about providing the devices and the
Speaker 4: skills and the training in order for those people to
Speaker 4: partake in our digital economy, which that's what the economy
Speaker 4: is today. So what a companies. The digital divide is
Speaker 4: the economic divide. And I'm actually very happy with the
Speaker 4: Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act because it's really made to
Speaker 4: focus on equity. If you look at the acronym broadband, equity,
Speaker 4: access and deployment, equity is a key component.
Speaker 5: You take out equity and it's bad.
Speaker 1: In how many in Vermont right now don't have broadband service?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, that's that depends how you ask the question.
Speaker 4: Right Our rule is if it's not fiber, it's not broadband.
Speaker 4: You know, This is a debate that's been going on
Speaker 4: for a long time in the telecom community.
Speaker 5: If you're looking in the.
Speaker 4: Rearview mirror, you'll hear some of the existing telecom providers say,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, people are only using twenty five megabits per second.
Speaker 5: That's a speed, right, It's like.
Speaker 4: Twenty we're only going twenty five miles an hour, So
Speaker 4: we don't need these big highways. So you know, we're
Speaker 4: investing money that only happens once in a one hundred years, right,
Speaker 4: So let's invest in a forty year network.
Speaker 5: That's why we're committed to fiber.
Speaker 4: The reason I'm given that long answer is because we
Speaker 4: only have thirty percent of vermontitors connected to fiber right now.
Speaker 1: So what are you hearing from residents about this big
Speaker 1: plan to introduce broadband across the state.
Speaker 5: Well, we're hearing two things.
Speaker 4: One is a level of excitement, yes, you know, especially
Speaker 4: from some of the more technical users. Yes, absolutely the
Speaker 4: right thing to do, get fiber to everybody. But on
Speaker 4: the other hand, there's others that say, holy cow, it's
Speaker 4: going to take you five years to get there.
Speaker 5: You know, what about us?
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's okay for the town that gets
Speaker 4: it first, Right, they're going to be happy. But the
Speaker 4: town that gets it last, they're not happy. That is
Speaker 4: what we're struggling with.
Speaker 1: How are you going to try to deal with that?
Speaker 4: Well, we're doing a lot of outreach, a lot of work.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I will point out that FDR in nineteen thirty five
Speaker 4: signed a executive order to get everybody with electricity. That
Speaker 4: was nineteen thirty five in Vermont. The last town to
Speaker 4: get electricity was nineteen sixty four. That was Victory, Vermont.
Speaker 4: So that was a long time. Right, we're talking at
Speaker 4: thirty years. We're going to do this in five.
Speaker 1: How do you decide who gets it first?
Speaker 5: Well, the good.
Speaker 4: News is physics decides who gets it first, not politics.
Speaker 1: Just you go to the closest to the furthest is
Speaker 1: that how it works.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: You got to you got to build out because you
Speaker 4: can't get to those outside areas without connecting the inside areas.
Speaker 4: So thank god, physics is what I can fall back
Speaker 4: on here.
Speaker 1: So what kind of labor is going to be required
Speaker 1: to build out all of this broadband infrastructure? Are you
Speaker 1: going to be creating a lot of jobs across the state.
Speaker 4: Yeah, The labor thing is definitely a thorny issue, and
Speaker 4: it's going to be a even thornier as these forty
Speaker 4: two and a half million dollars roll out throughout the
Speaker 4: entire country and we all start competing for the same
Speaker 4: labor pool. You know, when we try to get construction workers,
Speaker 4: we're reaching from the same labor pool that all of
Speaker 4: New England and New York State is pulling from. So
Speaker 4: we began working on this labor issue over a year ago, almost.
Speaker 5: Two years ago.
Speaker 4: Now we put together a workforce development team will be
Speaker 4: the first state to carry out this national apprenticeship program
Speaker 4: for fiber optic technicians. But we need a lot of
Speaker 4: folks to do this, and of course, you know, we're
Speaker 4: looking at even before COVID hit, we were in Vermont,
Speaker 4: we were looking at labor shortages, and now the problem
Speaker 4: has been exacerbated significantly. That's both a problem and an opportunity,
Speaker 4: you know, because we're going to have to look for
Speaker 4: labor and places that maybe we haven't looked for before,
Speaker 4: such as people on parole coming out of corrections. So
Speaker 4: it's an opportunity for people to get into a profession
Speaker 4: rather than take a job.
Speaker 1: So let's talk just a little bit about these jobs.
Speaker 1: What kind of jobs are going to be required, what
Speaker 1: are these opportunities, what they look like.
Speaker 5: Right away?
Speaker 4: We need outside and inside fiber technicians, and the outside
Speaker 4: work is a particular challenge. If you look at the
Speaker 4: outside work, you know, Vermont is a pretty tough place
Speaker 4: to work in the winter, and we have a lot
Speaker 4: of mountains, and we have a lot of trees, and
Speaker 4: you know, in these areas, half of our poles are
Speaker 4: running cross country, so you know, people go into the
Speaker 4: woods for a whole day, a teenam of four. You know,
Speaker 4: we need people who can work independently, who can work
Speaker 4: from heights, who have pretty good creative problem solvings, and
Speaker 4: can work well together. So it says it's a tough
Speaker 4: job and it's not for everybody.
Speaker 1: And how many people do you figure you're going to
Speaker 1: need to hire to wire the whole state?
Speaker 4: About six hundred people to train for these technicians to
Speaker 4: get two hundred out, you know, typically you train three
Speaker 4: to get one. There's a lot of accompanying jobs such
Speaker 4: as tree clearing, folks, flaggers. So overall we're looking at
Speaker 4: a total of six hundred additional people in the state,
Speaker 4: which that's probably not a lot for a state like
Speaker 4: New York. But we're the second smallest state in the nation.
Speaker 1: So you said this is going to take about five years.
Speaker 1: Paint us a picture of what Vermont's internet service looks
Speaker 1: like five years from now as opposed to right now.
Speaker 4: Well, right now, Vermont is fifth from the bottom in
Speaker 4: terms of states in terms of Internet performance. When we're done,
Speaker 4: will be number one. No other state has set a
Speaker 4: goal to get fiber optic internet to every address, and
Speaker 4: you know, I will say part of our job is
Speaker 4: to maximize the positive social impact of that, but there
Speaker 4: are going to be negative social impacts that you know,
Speaker 4: our legislatures working aggressively on. You know, one of the
Speaker 4: things about Vermont is if we get that connectivity, we
Speaker 4: have a housing crisis, and of course it'll drive the
Speaker 4: cost of housing even further up.
Speaker 5: Vermont's a beautiful place.
Speaker 4: The real estate agent's one of the first questions they
Speaker 4: hear from people who want to buy houses is are
Speaker 4: we connected to the internet. You know, I'll take Newport, Vermont.
Speaker 4: It's probably got one of the most beautiful lakes in
Speaker 4: the nation. Excuse my bias, but that said, you know,
Speaker 4: there's not connectivity around there, and once they get that connectivity,
Speaker 4: I can see people flocking to Newport front.
Speaker 1: And that would drive up housing crisis now.
Speaker 5: Drive up the costs.
Speaker 4: And of course the people in Newport, Vermont are the
Speaker 4: ones that are struggling most financially. So you know, we
Speaker 4: don't want to drive out working for monitors.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the downsides. What are some of
Speaker 1: the upside impacts?
Speaker 4: Oh, well, the upside, of course is our whole world
Speaker 4: has moved to telehealth, tele education. You know, we've done
Speaker 4: a lot of outreach to different communities. You'll find young
Speaker 4: people in their you know, fourteen fifteen year olds say hey,
Speaker 4: I don't want to move out of state. I want
Speaker 4: to stay in this state, but connectivity is important to
Speaker 4: me in my future. So you know, the benefits are
Speaker 4: we want our young people to stay in our state,
Speaker 4: and it provides an opportunity for growth. And by the way,
Speaker 4: it provides opportunity for those high intellectual margin businesses to
Speaker 4: locate here in Vermont.
Speaker 1: Christine, thank you, I appreciate your time here. Welcome, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's
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