The town government in Brookfield has been polling residents to determine the public stance on developing a municipal broadband network. The poll, which closed on April 27, asked respondents about their current access to the internet and whether they would be interested in the construction of a fiber optic network owned by the town.
Residents were also given the option to upload a copy of their internet bill in order to provide additional data for the report. The research was conducted on behalf of Brookfield by the Western Connecticut Coalition of Governments (WestCOG).
Greg Dembowski, Brookfield’s planning and community development manager, urged town residents to participate in the survey. Prior to the survey, a number of potential outcomes from establishing a municipal fiber optic network were displayed.
WestCOG conducted similar surveys for Ridgefield and New Fairfield, which indicated enough interest to warrant drafting plans for establishing a municipal broadband service that could be adopted by those towns. According to Michael Towle, the deputy director of WestCOG, the Ridgefield and New Fairfield plans could be ready for the towns to consider as early as the end of April.
“The broadband project came out of a side effect of Covid,”Towle said of the origins of the study. “After the pandemic it was very clear that there’s inequity to people’s access to internet. Everybody needed the internet for their careers and in school. Those who had it were well off and were fine and those who did not, struggled.”
WestCOG applied for the Long-Term Recovery Grant Award and was able to secure around $1 million for research into municipal options for fiber networks. According to Towle the emphasis will be on identifying the costs, legal challenges and advantages of the networks, with the first three towns being studied as a pilot program.
“Some of the benefits of a municipal owned, open access network that have been identified in these studies is that they generate competition,”Towle said. “I guess the easiest way to put it is that it changes the model: a private business has the intention to charge as much as they can at the lowest amount of work. That’s not necessarily their values but that’s how it becomes possible for them to provide services and charge what they do.”
“In the municipal model you’re trying to provide the maximum amount of service at the lowest cost,”Towle continued. “The municipality would own the information lines, the fiber network and they open up to internet service providers.”
According to Towle, residents would have the ability to choose between multiple service providers instead of being forced to utilize whichever company owns the local physical infrastructure.
“If you really realize you don’t like Optimum, that same day you could just click it off and now you have Verizon. Across the town all the houses are already hooked up so you’re not paying for the service fee of some technician to come to your building, then hook you up to their private network,” Towle said.
Towle also described unique advantages to municipal networks, such as the ability to send emergency alerts locally and have files that can be easily shared to any municipal customers such as public records or library materials. Towle indicated there could be a better ratio of maintenance and customer service staff while reducing rates, similar to the Third Taxing District in Norwalk, which buys electricity in bulk and distributes it throughout the eastern part of the city through its own transmission lines at below average prices while keeping a small maintenance team on staff to respond to outages faster than a larger power company could dispatch.
Towle said that WestCOG reached out to Norwalk’s taxing districts, as the funds for the study and other potential resources that have been made available through similar programs are not only open to municipalities but also existing public utility providers.
“I think they thought it was a bit beyond their scope,” Towle added, expressing hope that these studies will spark interest in exploring the possibilities of municipal broadband more widely. “These plans are for information purposes for the municipalities. We’re trying to inform leadership, so they can make informed decisions. Nothing is set in stone and no community is saying that they’re officially moving forward.”
Towle, however, noted that if enough interest was expressed, there are state and federal programs, which could be explored as a way of moving forward. No date has been announced for the release of the Brookfield poll results.
