Broadband network ready to go for Valley, western Mass

Daily Hampshire Gazette
By BEN STORROW
Staff Writer
July 26, 2011

Massachusetts Broadband Institute boss Judy Dumont has spent the last year in boardrooms across the state, haggling with lawyers and planners in an effort to bring high-speed Internet to rural regions that lack such access.

Today, she gets to don a construction helmet.

The MassBroadband123 network, which will comprise 1,338 miles of fiber-optic cable strung across western and central Massachusetts, officially moves from planning to construction today with a ceremony in Sandisfield.

Federal, state and local officials will gather in the Berkshire County town at 11 a.m. to celebrate the beginning of the network's construction. The event is open to the public and will take place at the fire station at 207 Sandisfield Road. Gov. Deval Patrick is among the officials scheduled to attend.

Dumont says the announcement means efforts are on-track to be completed by the project's July 2013 finish date.

"It really means that we're moving from the planning process into the doing process," Dumont said. "Now, over the next two years, there are going to be a number of crews in the field doing 'make-ready' work and attaching the network to the poles so it can be lit."

Today's step is the beginning of the most complicated part of the construction phase, Dumont said. Known as "make-ready work," crews must decide how to fit the new fiber-optic cable needed for broadband Internet onto the existing utility poles.

Most poles now consist of utility and phone lines, which must be a mandated distance from each other for safety reasons, Dumont said. Once crews figure out how to place the new cable onto existing or new poles, the fiber-optic cable can be strung, she said.

She said "make-ready" work has begun in Granville, Tolland and Sandisfield and is on schedule to start in other parts of the four western counties within the month.

Sandisfield was chosen as the site of the ceremony because the town is emblematic of what the state is trying to accomplish with the network, bringing broadband to community anchor institutions, Dumont said.

"We're connecting the police station, library and the town hall there," Dumont said, adding, "those are the type of institutions we are connecting across the region."

The ceremony will also mark the arrival of G4S, the firm hired by the state to complete the design and construction of the project, Dumont said.

"This completes a year of procurement, in order to get our whole team set" Dumont said. "Where I spent a year in boardrooms with lawyers, I got my first hard hat last week. Now we're switching to actually getting this thing built."