ECFiber Completes 23 Towns

Jul 06, 2023

By Staff | on June 29, 2023

ECFiber board chair F.X. Flinn, flanked by GWI Vermont CEO Tom Cecere, shakes hands with Corey Klinck, the network engineer, after formally announcing the hookup of the White River Valley substation. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

With great fanfare—including a keynote from a U.S. senator and a full brass band—ECFiber ceremonially “lit” its Hartford network location, closing the book on its initial mission to bring fiber-optic broadband service to its original 23 member towns.

A gathering was planned around White River Junction’s fiber optic cross connect cabinet, but possible rain moved the event inside the adjacent VFW hall.

F.X. Flinn, the longtime chair of the ECFiber board, served as master of ceremonies, welcoming the packed-in crowd and introducing a roster of speakers who, in one way or another, “did help make this miracle happen.”

The kernel for ECFiber was planted in 2006, but even before that, it grew out of the efforts of ValleyNet, which until recently operated the ECFiber.

ValleyNet, Flinn said, started at Dartmouth College in the 1990s with the aim of bringing local dial-up numbers to a region without any internet access at all.

“Why did somebody need to provide local dial-up? Because the big internet companies were not providing phone numbers in White River Junction or Lebanon,” Flinn expounded.

Former ValleyNet CEO Carole Munroe shows off a piece of commemorative fiber optic patch cable at ECFiber’s celebration Tuesday. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

He introduced the day’s keynote speaker, “one of our customers and one of our earliest supporters, Sen. Peter Welch.”

Coming to the lectern to a jaunty march played by the band, Welch beamed.

He told the audience about how ECFiber came from “an insight and a radical idea.”

“If we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunications companies to wire our homes and get us internet, we’d be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren,” he said. “There was no business model that made it work.”

That, he said, was the insight. The radical proposition, he went on, is that everyday citizens could take the future into their own hands.

“And that’s what we’ve done!”

Federal Funding

U.S. Sen. Peter Welch talks about his work with ECFiber over the past 18 years during a celebration in White River Junction on Tuesday. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

The ECFiber ceremony came on the heels of a boon for Vermont internet access. Welch pointed out that Christine Hallquist, the director of the Vermont Community Broadband Board, had recently come back from a visit to the White House where she received word that Vermont would be the recipient of a further $229 million dollars in federal funding to be put toward rural internet access.

In an interview with VTDigger.org, Hallquist estimated that it would cost the state roughly $650 million to make sure every Vermonter had a reliable connection to broadband internet. The recent round of funding, combined with $245 million in ARPA funding already committed to Vermont broadband, closes that gap to a level that the state could fill with bonding.

It was Hallquist’s work, Welch said, that encouraged the federal government to give a fresh look at internet connectivity maps compiled by providers that overstated the number of households with access to high-speed internet.

Giving Up Was ‘Not in the Cards’

When Welch wrapped up, Flinn went one-by-one through a number of ECFiber board members and supporters, who each shared stories about the early days and what came to be.

Chuck Worcester of Hartford was on the selectboard in 2007 when the first inter municipal agreement was signed for ECFiber.

Laredo Sola, who served as the ECFiber board chair about 10 years ago, talked about how the dream transformed into a tenable economic model, but despite that, investors wouldn’t touch the upstart broadband group. Nor would the federal or state government. Sola shared story after story of obstacles that stood in the way.

“We’re a community, we’re resilient, we’re going to do this ourselves,” Sola and the rest of the ECFiber folks decided.

More than 500 people made 479 separate investments in the early years when ECFiber raised money through promissory notes from those who wished to sign on to the broad band service.

Barnard became the first town to see ECFiber’s promise come true. A diligent board member named Dan Lovett signed up 65% of the town’s households and suddenly, the lights went on.

“I don’t think giving up was ever in the cards,” Jerry Ward of Randolph added. “Out of the ashes, we saw another idea emerge: maybe we could just build it.”

Dan Childs of Brookfield followed up, talking about how access to internet has materially changed life on the dirt road where Childs lives.

He described his road when he moved there as a growing ghost town.

“Our neighborhood has changed,” he said. “Fewer than half of the houses are now lived in by retirees, there are no summer vacation homes, there are two farms, but the big difference is that in eight of those 22 homes, the people who live there now work remotely,” he said.

“When we first moved there, there were two teenage children on that road. Now there are 13 children under the age of 10,” Childs added. “So our neighborhood has changed dramatically.”

“Without that high-speed fiber optic internet, that would never have happened.”

Making it Happen

Flinn credited former ValleyNet CEO, Tim Nulte for the inspiration to base ECFiber in Royalton. There, Nulte had said, the organization could be more centrally located and much closer to the communities that most needed access.

Another former ValleyNet CEO, Carole Monroe talked about how she was awed by the progress ECFiber has made.

“In 2011,” she said, “ECFiber offered service at 5 meg, 10 meg, and 20 megabits per second. Today, they offer 75 as their basic offering, 300, and a gigabit service. And here, in White River Junction, will be the first time they’ll be able to offer a 10 gigabit service.”

Irv Tomae, a one-time chair of the ECFiber board, and Vermont Rep. Jim Masland talked about advocating for the creation of what are now called communications union districts or CUDs.

“Many decades ago in public policy circles, there was an ugly term called ‘benign neglect,’” Tomae said. “What we were dealing with as rural would-be customers was maligned neglect by big telecom companies. If it wasn’t profitable for them, they didn’t want anyone to do it.”

He went on to describe how Vermont legislators— specifically calling out Masland as well as Sen. Mark MacDonald—helped push through the bill that created the CUDs, essentially, as Masland described it, making purpose-built “municipalities” with the mission of creating internet access.

“With that we were able to borrow money in [increments] of several million dollars,” he said, which enabled the initially six-town build out.

Making it Official

Wrapping up the ceremony, Flinn called Tom Cecere, the CEO of GWI Vermont, which now operates ECFiber, and Corey Klinck, the chief network engineer, to the stage.

Flinn held up a yellow fiber optic patch cable, which he likened to the golden spike that completed the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869.

“Like the golden spike moment, we have the golden patch cord moment!”

To a hall filled with cheers, Klinck announced that the network had been plumbed in and Cecere proclaimed “the White River Junction hub is lit and all of the original 23 towns are now capable of gigabit!”

With White River Junction hooked up, the town of Hartford officially came online, completing the initial buildout of the 23 members towns.

Plenty remains to do, however. Klinck, noted that setting up redundant routes is a growing priority and the second route into Hartford was still in progress. So too is construction in an additional eight towns that have signed on as ECFiber members— three of them are under construction now.