News Feature

Blue Hill Originally published in The Weekly Packet, March 5, 2015 How to wire the Peninsula and Deer Isle for Internet access? Chamber of Commerce widens the discussion

by Anne Berleant

We live in a world driven by wires—electricity, telephone, cable and fiber—and all have the potential of connecting us to the Internet. Yet, Maine sits at the bottom among states for its Internet connection speed.



A cross section of town officials from Stonington to Castine met at the Blue Hill Peninsula Chamber of Commerce office on February 26 to hear the latest in Internet technology and discuss how best to provide faster access to the area.



Downloads and uploads to the Internet are measured in megabytes per second, but for most individuals and businesses what counts is how fast photographs or image-heavy documents can be transmitted. For those customers without broadband service, the answer is simple: very, very slowly.



Chamber board member and Blue Hill resident Butler Smythe hosted the talk and focused his presentation on wired and wireless broadband access, redefined in January by the Federal Communications Commission as a download speed six times faster than it was before, or a minimum of 25 megabits per second.



Most individuals and businesses across the Peninsula and Deer Isle connect to the web through either dial-up or DSL service across telephone lines, satellite service, high-speed cable or wireless. Only cable lines and wireless transmit at broadband speed but, for individuals or home-based businesses, the wires that count are those that run from the street poles into their homes. An example is Turkey Farm Road in Blue Hill, where Time Warner installed high-speed cable lines across the poles but not into homes not close to the road. And in Brooklin, most of the 73 businesses are “small, in-home,” said Selectman Deborah Brewster.



Technology “is changing very rapidly,” said Smythe, and “the final solution is not one thing.”



The question is which technologies best fit the Peninsula? Fiber optic cable is a “long way off” for homes and businesses, Smythe said, and 4G LTE wireless, which uses a radio interface mounted on cell towers for faster signal processing, is now only available in higher density areas. Also, local geography often blocks access to cell tower signals—which themselves must somewhere connect to fiber optic cable.



“All wireless eventually goes down to fiber,” said Surry Selectman and retired AT&T fiber optic professional Bill Matlock. “The question is where it connects.”



Maine Fiber Company, a private Maine-based company using federal and private donations to facilitate broadband availability, has strung fiber optic wires across 29,000 poles at a cost of $25 million (grant funds), plus $7.4 million in private investments. It anchors institutions, like the University of Maine system, but Internet service providers have to provide “the last mile” to individual homes and businesses—and towns with a population density below 5,000 are not considered financially viable for local companies. That has left the project “slow to develop beyond just a bunch of wires hanging from a pole,” Smythe said. Still, “it raised the bar” for high-speed access in Maine.



Funding future broadband access, whether wired or wireless, is another question. State and federal grant money is available, and town officials are talking with companies such as Red Zone, Premium Choice, Time Warner and FairPoint, which offer widely varying financial investment.



For chamber executive director Johanna Barrett, however, the question was not what choices technology offered but what individuals and businesses in our area want and can afford. “At the end of the day, we are not densely populated and don’t have high incomes,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons dial-up [service] is still widely used here.” The chamber will soon release a survey to collect data from the communities it serves.



But many seated at the table made the point that for local economic viability, high speed Internet is a must. “The websites built by the rest of the world assume a certain speed,” Matlock said. “The world is moving along and we’re not.”



What’s your speed?



Internet speed is measured in megabits per second (mbps). (File size is measured in megabytes (MB), with 1 MB equal to 8 megabits.) In January, the FCC re-defined broadband access as a minimum of 25 mbps for downloads and 3 mbps for uploads.



Test your Internet speed at:



speedtest.org



fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america/mobile



speakeasy.net



Comparing download speeds:



Dial-up: 56 kbps



DSL: 256 kbps to 100 mbps, depending on DSL technology, line conditions, and service-level.



Satellite: Up to 50 mbps.



Wireless: Up to 150 mbps.



Cable: Up to 400 mbps for businesses and 250 mbps for residential



4G LTE wireless: Up to 300 mbps



Fiber optic: Up to 100 petabits per second. One petabit equals 1 billion megabits.

