Two and a half years ago, I wrote a piece titled “Auditors Report: Just How Bad Lawmakers Screwed Up the Broadband Buildout.” This followed a post nearly two years before that, when Covid was raging, schools were closed, and kids in rural communities were doing their online homework from their cars in McDonald’s parking lots, stealing Ronald’s WiFi. But the lawmakers in Montpelier made the incredibly selfish and shortsighted decision to reject Starlink, the low-earth-orbit satellite system, as an option for providing high-speed internet service to rural, underserved communities desperately in need.
At the time, Rep. Laura Sibilia (I-Dover) of the Energy & Technology Committee said, “I have less than zero interest in facilitating or seeing the state facilitate [a contract with Starlink] (Bennington Banner, 4/5/21).” And so, they didn’t! Instead, she and a merry band of geniuses under the Golden Dome enacted a bureaucratic, money-sucking quagmire consisting of ten Communications Union Districts (CUDs) overseen by a Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB), which, coincidentally, LOL, Sibilia has been on since its inception.
All this background is by way of saying, rural Vermonters have been promised statewide fiberoptic-based high speed internet for years by politicians who have wasted a boatload of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars and not delivered – all while the much cheaper, less environmentally disruptive solution, Starlink, that could be implemented almost immediately after a decision to take advantage of it had been made sat and still sits waiting in the wings, aggressively ignored.
How bad/corrupt was/is this decision to not use Starlink? An Associated Press story ran last week titled, Vermont Broadband Board Outlines $180M Funding Proposal, With Major Investment in NEK. $180 million. This is touted in the article as a “once in a generation investment…” apparently forgetting the fact that just in this generation, the Obama Administration gave Vermont $116 million to build out broadband, and the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) poured $150 into the CUDs – and these ‘investments’ did not deliver. But let’s get back to just this latest $180 million proposal.
Today, you can find a Starlink standard kit on sale for less than $200 (and have it delivered in three days or pick it up yourself same day.) So, for $180 million we could buy 900,000 of these – one for every single Vermonter with over a quarter million units left over for us to give as Christmas gifts to friends and family in other states. More fun with the calculator function on my phone, if we bought every household in Vermont (about 240,000) a Starlink set up, it would cost just $48 million. But if we’re only talking about the 10,000 addresses across seventy-two Northeast Kingdom towns this $180 million is supposed to serve, Starlink could cover that nut for less than $2 million – a savings of $178 million.
“But NOOOOOOO!” to quote the late, great John Belushi.
Christina Hallquist, who now chairs the Vermont Community Broadband board for a cool $150K a year, poopooed the idea of Starlink back in 2021 when former Chief Technology Officer for the State of Vermont, Tom Evslin, first recommended it, and continues to poopoo it today. According to the AP article, Hallquist said of providers like Starlink, “’We defined them as a non-priority technology,’ and the state will use low Earth orbit satellites only where the cost for ground technology exceeds $17,000 for a single location.”
That’s insane. This bureaucrat will only consider a $200 solution to a problem that can be installed within 24 hours by the homeowner in cases where the inexcusably inefficient preferred policy costs more than $17,000 and could potentially take years of digging ditches and clearing trees with fossil fuel guzzling machines across a thousand miles of Vermont landscape to complete – if they ever do. I hope this is just corruption, because nobody could actually be this stupid or incompetent.
Thankfully because of a federal rule change the $119 million grant (your federal tax dollars) that the Community Broadband board is applying for (the rest of the $180 million would come from private and state funds – aka your Vermont tax dollars) is now open for a direct competitive bid by Starlink, and according to the AP, Starlink has applied. Good!
Let’s hope they win the bid. Because those freshman students tapping McDonald’s WiFi to do their homework five years ago have graduated by now. Our politicians have failed them, and there is no indication another $180 million wasted on political nest-feathering will change anything for the current generation or the next.
