Key day for broadband

Berkshire Eagle
July 27, 2011

Expanded broadband access is critical to improving the lives of rural Berkshire residents and making those communities more attractive to newcomers and businesses. A long-awaited and important leap forward was made Tuesday when construction began in Sandisfield of the MassBroadband123 fiber-optic network.

Nearly $80 million in state and federal funding, secured through the Massachusetts Broadband Initiative (MBI), will fund the 1,300-mile Internet backbone extending through 120 towns in Western and North-Central Massachusetts. It is estimated that the project will provide high-speed access to about 330,000 households and 44,000 businesses when completed, along with nearly 1,400 schools, libraries and hospitals and public safety facilities. One of the first in the latter category to be served will be the Sandisfield Fire Department, which hosted an MBI meeting Tuesday before the ceremony initiating construction, which featured Governor Deval Patrick, an aggressive advocate of extending broadband into rural areas of the state.

In a speech last month at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington where he was being honored by the Berkshire International Film Festival, film-maker, special effects pioneer and South Berkshire resident Douglas Trumbull mentioned how desperately he needed broadband access. Mr. Trumbull, who also spoke of establishing a film studio in rural south county, may be unique as a small businessman, but he should have company in rural Berkshire towns that are desirable to live in and will become more attractive to businesses once broadband becomes widely available. Those kinds of businesses will be instrumental to the economic revival of the Berkshires in the years and decades ahead.

The grant money is available until July of 2013, providing two years to, among other components of the ambitious project, attach fiber-optic cable to 35,000 utility poles in the project's service area. We hope the companies that own those poles expedite the broadband hookups, and as the governor told their representatives Tuesday, "If there's going to be haggling, get to ‘yes' quickly."

Providing the "last mile" connection to homes, businesses and others served by high-speed broadband will also pose challenges, but the MBI plans to work with a variety of servers to make this link. MassBroadband123 offers an excellent example of a successful public-private partnership, one whose benefits in the Berkshires will be considerable and of lasting impact.