Danbury wants high-speed internet in all homes

DANBURY - Before the city rolls out an ambitious plan to provide cheap, high-speed Internet service to every home in Danbury, the city wants to be sure that’s what residents want.

Early next year City Hall will conduct telephone surveys to gauge support for a plan to team up with a private fiber optic company to offer high-speed Internet service for $15 a month - about half the going rate.

“They would save money, they would have better service, and they would have better speed,” Mayor Mark Boughton said on Tuesday. “It all makes sense.”

Boughton announced the Internet initiative during his State-of-the-City speech on Friday as part of a larger 2016 vision to encourage economic development and community connectedness.

The idea grew out of a separate plan to provide free wireless Internet service along the Main Street corridor in central downtown - a project that depends on the city’s ability to buy light poles from the utility Eversource.

The proposal also would advance the city’s effort to provide low-income families with equal access to the educational potential of the Internet, thereby helping to close the “digital divide” between income groups and narrow the achievement gap in schools.

Boughton’s plan differs from a statewide initiative to build a super-speed network for internet hook-ups known as the CT Gig project.

That initiative, which lost momentum last year when a statewide cable and telecommunications association said it would not make economic sense, proposes to provide speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second.

The state’s average download speed is 9 megabits per second.

“We thought the CT Gig project was a bit too aggressive,” said Stephen Nocera, the city’s director of project excellence. “That is a lot of data to put in one home, which doesn’t make much sense.”

Boughton agreed.

“The problem is they want to build their own network, and at the snail’s pace they are going, we will have this rolled out before they have one city lit up,” Boughton said.

Boughton’s plan is to team up with a fiber-optics company already in the city and use Danbury’s substantial buying power to cut a deal for homeowners.

The plan, which would be rolled out in phases, could be implemented in select homes by the summer. If that happens, Danbury would be one of few places in the country with such a public-private partnership for Internet service.

But first the city wants to check with its residents.

“We think it is a good idea that has promise, but before we go and create it we need to have to have the support of the people,” Nocera said.

Boughton agreed.

“We have to have a certain amount of participants in order to break even,” Boughton said. “We don’t want to be in a position where we are laying out all this money for the infrastructure and we don’t have enough people to pay for it. That would be a disaster.”

rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342