Vermont's Community-Driven Broadband for All - Episode 606 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Ellie de Villiers (00:07):
If you take shareholder returns out of the picture, it enables you to stretch your dollar further.

Christopher Mitchell (00:12):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and I'm in St. Paul. I'm here with Ry Marcattilio, who's down in Mankato. Welcome Ry.

Ry Marcattilio (00:28):
Thank you Chris. Good to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:30):
[00:00:30] And we are speaking with Ellie de Villiers, who is the Executive Director of Maple Broadband in Vermont. Welcome.

Ellie de Villiers (00:38):
Thank you so much. Very glad to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:41):
The last second improvisation, I want to say Vermont kit. I don't know where that came from. I doubt that anyone's ever said anything that dumb before, but just want to get that on the record. This is going to be a show that I think Ry and Ellie are going to be going back and forth, and then I'll be [00:01:00] in a little bit. That's the goal, and I'll probably flap my mouth more than I expect, but that's why I'm going to hand it over to Ry to kick off the interview. Ry, as you're doing that, I'm hoping you're going to introduce a certain paper that you've authored recently.

Ry Marcattilio (01:12):
I don't think I know what you're talking about

Christopher Mitchell (01:15):
Already under the next thing.

Ry Marcattilio (01:18):
So we're having a conversation with Ellie today about broadband in Vermont and it just so happens that myself and my colleague over at Benton, Revati Prasad, just [00:01:30] released a paper called the Neighborly Networks: Vermont's Approach to Community Broadband. And it is an attempt to look at the big picture and how the CUD model in Vermont went from existing for the last 15 years, but being a relatively localized approach to being the big apparatus through which the state of Vermont is going to solve the infrastructure gap for the communities left behind by the private broadband marketplace. Does that feel fair to you, Ellie, as a characterization?

Ellie de Villiers (02:00):
[00:02:00] I think that sounds about right.

Ry Marcattilio (02:01):
So I wonder if you could start us off a little bit, but by just telling us what it's like to live in western Vermont. I

Ellie de Villiers (02:08):
Would say it's wonderful to live in western Vermont. So I grew up here. Actually, the property that I grew up on has been in my family for several generations. So my great grandfather had it as a dairy farm. Yeah, so this is where I was born. This is where I grew up, as many people do. I left the area and then I came back. So I've lived in cities, I lived as far away as South Africa and [00:02:30] Vermont drew me back home. It's a wonderful place to live. There's a great lifestyle here and we have four full seasons, so you really get to appreciate the weather and all of its variety at all times of year.

Ry Marcattilio (02:40):
We are in Minnesota, I know that well, although at the moment we are experienced maybe the fifth season called torrential flooding. And I should say, if you guys lose me on the stream, we had bad flooding over the weekend and a dam, 110 year old dam just north of where I'm at, upstream of where we're at.

Christopher Mitchell (02:58):
On the other hand, [00:03:00] you got a classic workout of Save the Basement.

Ry Marcattilio (03:03):
That's right. It was a weekend of pumping a basement out. So if you lose me, I've got floaties on. Don't worry about it. I'll turn up downstream somewhere.

Christopher Mitchell (03:10):
And Ellie, I just have to ask, Vermont being a primarily north south, south state, when you say Western Vermont, are there like eight people that live in Western Vermont? What qualifies as Western Vermont?

Ellie de Villiers (03:22):
I don't know. I mean you asked the question, not me. So Vermont

Christopher Mitchell (03:26):
Also, it's a rye invention.

Ellie de Villiers (03:28):
Yeah, well, so [00:03:30] it is a northwest state. So the Green Mountains essentially bisect the state in the middle and people live in the Green Mountains as well. So actually I'd say the majority of our population probably lives in the western half of the states. So the Champlain Valley going up to Lake Champlain and then there's, there are of course a lot of people in some big cities on the eastern side as well, but a lot of the eastern side is the northeast kingdom, which tends to be a little bit more sparsely populated. But don't quote me on that because I'm not an expert in Vermont demographics.

Ry Marcattilio (03:55):
What you are an expert at is broadband infrastructure in both rural and partly urban parts [00:04:00] of the state of Vermont. And so I wonder if we could set a little, or you could help me set a little context here, maybe we're talking about Maple Broadband, which is another name for the Addison County Communications Union District in Vermont. The Communications Union District or CUD model is something that's been around in Vermont for 15 years or more. It is a method by which towns can band together to solve infrastructure gaps in the places where they exist. Can you give us [00:04:30] a little prime around what Maple Broadband is and how it started? Before

Ellie de Villiers (04:33):
I do that, I actually want to give a little bit further history. So when I first heard of the CUD model, I was actually living in South Africa and there's a guy named Steve Song who you probably know, maybe not if you don't, you certainly should. And he actually mentioned EEC fiber as being a model of an innovative community network. So I mean, I can say with a straight face that it's known internationally, this model. And so it was really interesting for me coming back to Vermont in 2020 right before the pandemic, [00:05:00] and of course as one does moving countries, I was working in broadband over in Africa and I started looking around for volunteer opportunities and jobs and whatnot. And that was right when Mappa Broadband was getting going. So it was actually formed later that year, I think I forget what month it was in late 2020 that the governing board decided to give it the name and to file formerly with the Secretary of State's office.

(05:23):
That's a little bit of the history. So essentially a Communications Union District is a grouping of two or more towns that have banded together [00:05:30] for the purpose of furthering broadband infrastructure. So there's the original model EC fiber. So EC fiber, when it originally started, it wasn't a Communications Union District, it was an interlocal agreement between towns and the history of how and why CDs came actually flows directly through EC fiber because long story short, they were trying to get funding through one method or another. And when they eventually got to the point of trying to raise funding, it turns out that no one knows what on earth an interlocal organization is and isn't really very comfortable [00:06:00] funding such a thing. So they went to the legislature and essentially asked, could you please create a structure for us? Because the funders were saying, well, okay, you're broadband infrastructure, so why aren't you a Syria district?

(06:12):
Why aren't you, aren't you something like that? Why aren't you municipal co-op? That's why the legislature working with the people at EC fiber came up with this idea of a broadband utility district called A CUD, which some people call a cud. That's a little bit of Vermont, this for you there. But for the most part [00:06:30] we refer to ourselves as CDs. So Maple Broadband is one of 10 CDs at the moment, and I wasn't there in its early, early, early days of origination. But as I said, I moved back to Vermont in early 2020 and I actually got myself on the governing board as an alternate and that's when the story started.

Ry Marcattilio (06:50):
I'm wondering, could you give us a picture, October the fall of 2020 is six months into the pandemic. Can you give us a sense of what the [00:07:00] broadband infrastructure gaps were like in your area at that time? I know that you had some communities that had decent but probably higher price than they wanted to pay cable service. You had a bunch of places where the unserved and the underserved hit more than 80%, I think places like Orwell and Shoham. What else can you tell us about broadband in your

Ellie de Villiers (07:20):
Area? The best way to answer that question is giving a little bit of a geography lesson, which I know is hard without visuals. But Maple Broadband or Addison County Communications Union District is comprised [00:07:30] of 20 towns, the in Addison County. And within that footprint there are three different iex. So there is Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom, which as of now is actually our operating partner. So we have a partnership arrangement with them. And the other two, one is called trade name is Go net speed, and they operate in four towns in the southwestern portion. And then the remainder is from a company called Consolidated Communications. Within that footprint, there are three, I guess [00:08:00] you could call them metros, but three towns. So the biggest one is really the county seat that's Middlebury. And then I'm actually not sure if Vers or Bristol's, bigger population wise.

(08:09):
Vers is the smallest city in Vermont. It's called the Little City. So it's a tiny little area, but it's quite dense population. And then there's Bristol. So vers in Middlebury are both in consolidated, consolidated elec footprint, and Bristol is in Waitsfield and Champlain Valley, telecoms, ILEC footprint. All three of those had and have to this day fairly [00:08:30] substantial footprint from Xfinity Comcast. And then not entirely sure how much fiber, I think the Waitsfield had some fiber in Bristol at that point. I'm not sure how much coverage there was. And other than that, there was practically no fiber go. NetSpeed had, I don't know, maybe a couple of miles and a little bit of Cornwall. And I think, I'm not sure if they had it back then. They had it pretty soon after, but there was practically no. And so some of the areas, the district actually many towns or well and Sharmer are [00:09:00] the best examples because they were 99% or a hundred percent unserved, underserved according to the definitions at the time from treasury, but also then from the state of Vermont, which defined unserved and underserved as lacking 25 3.

(09:13):
And so people in these areas, they would struggle to do a Zoom call, they would struggle to download documents, they would struggle to upload doc. I mean you've heard the horror stories, but that was the reality. And this is of course particularly tough on the pandemic and I don't want to just pick on those sounds because the same was true [00:09:30] in Addison Panton Bridgeport as well. So it's not necessarily a question of which Ilec, it was really more a question of where there was density, there's better infrastructure where there wasn't, there's the challenge of opportunity cost. And so there simply was not anything other than this really, really slow and unreliable DSL.

Christopher Mitchell (09:50):
And for some additional context, Vermont is unfriendly to wireless and that unfriendliness geographically [00:10:00] is only exceeded by the unfriendliness of people to big towers in their view shed. So Vermont has long been known as a place that is extremely hard to serve because it is extremely low density for the Northeast especially. But in general, people don't want a lot of wireless. And wireless doesn't work really well out there. And then one other piece that I just want to throw out there is that, Ellie, you mentioned IEX a few times, if people aren't familiar, just incumbent local exchange carrier, it just [00:10:30] means the telephone company historically. So whoever did telephone in the eighties, we call them the ILAC today. Yeah.

Ry Marcattilio (10:36):
So you've got these connectivity problems in your area, Addison County CUD forms in the fall of 2020, presumably what you spend a year or whatever studying the problem. You start to talk about what kinds of solutions you can conceivably bring. Today there are, as you mentioned, 10 CDs. They're doing a variety of things to solve the connectivity problems in their [00:11:00] communities, everything from operating their own network to doing something open access, but a handful of them are doing partnerships. So can you tell us what solution you settled on and why?

Ellie de Villiers (11:10):
So 2021, I think the theme of this year for us as well as for others, was really exactly as you said, which is trying to understand how to go from a feasibility study that's many of us had funded under prior grants over the course of 2020 or finishing up in late 2020, how to turn those feasibility studies into reality. [00:11:30] And so the state of Vermont took about 250 million of ARPA funding and they used that to create a broadband construction program to create the Vermont Community Broadband board, which is our broadband office in Vermont. And so that really had two programs. There's a pre-construction program which funded further feasibility studies and detailed design as well as make ready. And then there was a construction program which funded construction. So really this is the vast oversimplification, but [00:12:00] you can think of 2021 as the year of pre-construction design.

(12:04):
And 2022 is the year when the uds got to the point of saying, okay, well now we've done our feasibility analysis, we have done our detailed design, we have gotten our business models and our plans to the point where we can actually apply for construction funding because very wisely, both the Vermont legislature and Vermont Broadband board insisted that if they were going to fund something with this construction money, there had to be [00:12:30] a viable business plan because the last thing that anyone wanted was to be funding tens of millions of dollars into something which was not then going to be self-sustaining. Yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (12:39):
We'd already done that.

Ellie de Villiers (12:40):
Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean imagine that. Imagine making that mistake. So kind of an obvious thing to be doing, but nonetheless it's a good thing to be doing. That was really the work that we did as Maple Broadband in 2021 is we put out RFPs and we selected an engineering firm, we did a high level design, we started to work [00:13:00] on detailed design, and we teed ourselves up for early 2022, getting to the point of going and applying for our construction grads.

Christopher Mitchell (13:07):
We kind of skipped the step. And I just want to go back and Elliot, I don't want you to spend too long on it, but I'm curious, what is your sense of why it is that Vermont recognized this approach that I feel like Ryan, I would say is obvious and amazing, and we still have high hopes for others might say the jury is out. I think we're thrilled at the way, but for me watching Vermont, the state [00:13:30] of Vermont didn't exactly love EC fiber in the early days. I felt like they were suspicious and had concerns and then they did a big switch. And I'm just curious if you have any sense of how that happened.

Ellie de Villiers (13:40):
I'm probably not the best person to answer that because I wasn't actually living here in the early EC fiber days. And so by the time I arrived, the decision had been made to fund public infrastructure. So I mean, the only answer that I can give from having been around the State House and talked to people after the fact is that in as much as there may have been questioning of EC fiber in [00:14:00] the early days, by the time the pandemic came around, EC fiber was a demonstrable success. It succeeded in what it had tried to do building up from a shoestrings, and there was likewise frustration with funding the private sector and perhaps not having the outcomes that were desirable there. And also I think if I may perhaps a little bit of frustration of saying, well, the private companies had monopolies, regional monopolies in these areas because [00:14:30] there wasn't really any competition and have failed to invest, and why should we take public money and reward them for failing to invest?

(14:36):
Maybe we should try something different. Because I think one of the things that EC fiber says, which really rings true to me, and I should also say I've come from the private sector as well, there's nothing wrong with it, but the nice thing in a challenging economic environment when you're trying to work on affordable access or reaching the last mile where there's a challenging business case is if you take shareholder returns out of the picture, it enables you to stretch your dollar [00:15:00] further. That's a truism, if you will, which made the challenge what we're trying to do here, which is not to bring competition necessarily into the towns and cities. The districts can choose to do that if they feel that it furthers the business case. But the construction grant money was not for that. The construction grant money was to build to the unserved and underserved. And again, if you're a nonprofit organization, you can stretch the limited dollars further. That's my sense. I don't know again if that's historically completely [00:15:30] accurate, but that's my view.

Ry Marcattilio (15:31):
And I would add to that from all the folks we talked to for the report, I think one of the themes that shot through the entire thing was those who would eventually become leadership among all the CDs in Vermont and at the state level, we're looking at the early days of the pandemic and realizing that the state of Vermont was not going to be in the top one or five or eight line items for any of the big ISPs to deploy new infrastructure too. And so they realized to an [00:16:00] extent that if they want to solve this problem once and for all, it's going to have to become a locally based solution. That brings us nicely. Ellie, to this question of you've got a bunch of different cuds at different stages along the way today, and you guys are doing a partnership with Waitsfield. Can you give us a sense of what that looks like? So

Ellie de Villiers (16:18):
Our partnership has really two different angles to it. There's 22 times that are part of the Maple Broadband district in Addison County. Approximately half of that is within the WCVT ilac or telephone company footprints. [00:16:30] And the other half is outside the footprint. So they were already rolling out fiber before we came along. And one of the things that we also did in 2021 is figure out who we thought, or again, through RFP and through discussions, pick an operating partner. So I wasn't closely involved at that time. I was on the governing board, but not on the executive committee. And I joined that in early 22. And then I came on a staff in October of 2022, so I wasn't involved in those discussions, but Whitfield came out as the top for our operating [00:17:00] partner. And what I mean by that is that essentially you can think of us as an infrastructure company.

(17:05):
So we're an infra co, and Waitsfield is the servco, the service company. So it's our job to design, build, fund, ensure the infrastructure and maintain it and upgrade it over time and extend it as new houses get built and line extensions happen. And their job essentially is to do customer service and back office and billing. And we operate under the Maple Broadband brand. So part of [00:17:30] what also falls under our remits is the marketing and the public relations and the Maple broadband. One of the reasons for this is that especially in a rural area, it is really important to make sure that you have the take rates necessary to make your business case work. And again, not to say that Waitsfield wouldn't have done a great job if we said, okay, we're going to be a pure infrastructure company and you use your brand across everything, but at the end of the day, it's a little bit risky to put the trust of your financial success into anyone else's hands.

(17:59):
Anyone [00:18:00] that's ever had a partnership can understand this. Your partners, as great as they are, they never care quite as much about your business as you do. And that is normal and that is natural. That's part of our relationship with them is that they essentially are the back office of Maple Broadband. When someone calls up Maple Broadband on the phone or they email Maple Broadband, they're usually dealing with an employee of Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom. The other implication of this, of course, is that another very wise requirements of the broadband funding was that you not only have to have a sustainable business model, [00:18:30] but you also have to have what they called a universal service plan, which is to say a plan to connect every unserved underserved address. So note taking these tens of millions of dollars in building out part and then saying, oh, well, sorry, other towns too bad.

(18:43):
So our business plan had to anticipate taking on debts to be able to build those other areas. But what we discussed in our partnership with Waitsfield is that, so obviously if they were going to be our operating partner, they probably didn't want us going and competing with them in their footprint. [00:19:00] That would not have gone over so well. As I mentioned earlier, they were also building on fiber anyway. And so what we said is we said, okay, well your responsibility under the universal service plan is to build out your footprint, so we'll support you to get some of this construction funding to do that, and the rest of it you'll have to take on debt, and that reduces our build, that reduces our risk, and so we will take care of the rest. So we have a unique relationship because there's a couple of other CDs that have partnered with Waitsfield for the former parts to be their back office and their customer [00:19:30] support and their installations, but we're the only one that has an overlap in terms of that telephone company IIC footprint. And so we have a little bit more of a nuanced partnership

Ry Marcattilio (19:39):
With them, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is it true to say that Maple Broadband that you guys will own any of the infrastructure that you build with public dollars, but W-C-E-V-T will maintain ownership of new infrastructure in its current IIC footprint?

Ellie de Villiers (19:52):
Yes, that's correct.

Christopher Mitchell (19:54):
I think some people might also be wondering what happens, people who live outside of the towns, because in most of Minnesota, [00:20:00] some people live in town and then other people live in unincorporated areas. But I think in Vermont, if I remember correctly, basically everyone lives in town, right? There's no areas outside of town effectively because it's another town, right?

Ellie de Villiers (20:13):
Yeah. I mean there are some unincorporated Gores and things, but none of those are in my footprint, but they essentially form small or they behave like small unincorporated towns. As far as I'm

Ry Marcattilio (20:24):
Aware. I do have a question about that question of I territory and getting to [00:20:30] all the universal service plan. But before we get to there, I did want to ask you, so you've got this plan, you've got the partnership with Waitsfield. Presumably you've got some momentum built and money is coming in from the VCBB and maybe a couple other sources where you started construction I think in the summer of 2022. And where are you at today? Where are you at this point in the summer of 2024?

Ellie de Villiers (20:54):
So we started in October of 2022 actually. And October 1st happened to be [00:21:00] a very easy to remember dates, and as of now, we are just a couple of weeks away from wrapping up what we're calling our phase two. So we started our phase one in the southwestern portion, so some of the most unserved underserved areas. So it was substantial portions of Cornwall and almost all of Shoham, about 40% of Orwell and maybe a third of Whiting. So that was our phase one. And we started that October of 2022, and we actually only built about a little [00:21:30] bit under 30 miles over the winter. And then we took a pause for the spring. There was a couple of reasons for that. We wanted to have some momentum, but we also wanted to make sure that we didn't build 150 miles at first because you always make mistakes when you're starting out.

(21:43):
And it was a new combination of us, an engineering firm and construction firm and construction oversight and Waitsfield operating things. So we wanted to take a small bite and then learn from that. And we certainly did learn some lessons from our first, it was actually 25.7 miles that we brought on our first test customers in early January and [00:22:00] let them kick the tires for a couple of weeks. And so we had our official service launch in February, and then when Spring came around in April of last year that we really kicked up the rest of the network construction of phase one. And then that wrapped up took almost a year, so it was the end of February before that finished. And there was a couple of reasons. One of the reasons for delay early on was that we had some challenges with Make Ready, which is getting the telephone polls prepared.

(22:28):
And I think that [00:22:30] was a combination of factors, but in our part of the state and actually a large part of the state, theres a single poll owning utility and they do a really good job with their systems, but I think that they were just a little bit overwhelmed with the demand. And so things were a little bit slow, but we managed to work through that. And one of the biggest lessons that we've learned from that is just allow more lead time, because then if things do fall behind, it doesn't become a crisis. It just becomes something that you've planned for. I

Christopher Mitchell (22:56):
Don't know if we've ever had anyone come on and say that they had a good relationship with the [00:23:00] pole owners and they were doing a good job, so kudos just wanted to call that out.

Ellie de Villiers (23:05):
Well shout out to Green Mountain Power. They've been a great partner to us in some of the other Communications Union Districts. We actually had, we have an association of Communications Union Districts, which is called Kuda, which for my sins, I'm the chair of that. And so we actually was about, it was a little bit over a year ago. We actually as Kuda got involved in discussions with the Green Mountain Power and talked about these things very clearly and they really did come to the party and work with us. [00:23:30] We're also very lucky in that Vermont has some really good regulations around make ready and how things are meant to work. And so I'm well aware of the challenges that some other states have, and we have been tremendously lucky in that regard. I agree.

Ry Marcattilio (23:45):
I was just talking to our intern for the summer, Jack. He went to A-S-H-L-B sponsored Polls Symposium in DC and there were representatives from a few different states, including Vermont there, and one of the takeaways for him was [00:24:00] how well things seemed to be designed in Vermont. And the evidence of that is the relatively quick progress, not only you, but some of the other CDs haven't been able to make in a year, 18 months, two years.

Ellie de Villiers (24:11):
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So just finishing up the story, so our phase two of construction, we started, actually we started a little bit before phase one wrapped up, so earlier this year, and we are just a couple of weeks away from being done with that. And so what that looks like is [00:24:30] most of the remaining portions of Orwell, our footprint, we really have two islands. There's the southern one with Middlebury and ripped into the East, and then Cornwall, Shom, Orwell, Whiting to the southwest. And then there's a northern island which has the city of Virgins and the town of Ferris burg and the town of Waltham and some portions of the towns of Monkton in New Haven, which is my hometown. Our phase two is substantial portions that northern island and the things that we've left out are a areas that are already served [00:25:00] completely by Comcast Xfinity.

(25:04):
And so our construction grant allowed us to build down main roads in order to get to the unserved and underserved areas, which is a really good amount of flexibility that not all grants have. I mean, allowing us to build everything there including to serve them and to pay for drops, right? That's a difference in terms of how the BEAD funding, for example, works where you can build that middle mile, but you can't do any distribution fiber or serve anyone off it. So [00:25:30] because of that, our network hub is obviously located towards the center of that island. And so we wound up going down a lot of areas that were served, I mean properly served. They did in fact have Comcast Xfinity main roads to get to the outlying areas. So we wound up picking up a lot of passings in that. But the areas that are side roads or suburban areas that are fully served by Comcast, our construction grant didn't let us pay for those.

(25:57):
And the other areas that we excluded from that [00:26:00] are large areas that we plan to build, I guess next year in the BEAD program. We're successful with that. The other thing that I want to add is I mentioned that our construction funding came from ARPA funds originally through the broadband's program through the state of Vermont. Now, towns also received ARPA funding. And so Maple Broadband along with other cuds, we did go to our towns and we asked our towns for ARPA funding, and we were lucky in that exactly half of our towns gave us some portion of their ARPA allocation, some [00:26:30] totals, $415,000. And then the Vermont Community Broadband Board, they actually wound up matching that one-to-one. And the rule on that match is that we have to use it for the same purpose that the town's authorized, which is great because we went to our hounds, we asked them for essentially broad authority to do whatever we needed to do in furtherance of our mission to build fiber optic broadband.

(26:51):
So one of the things that we've done is we've built out some of the areas where there's a lot of density, but that we can get to a where there is Comcast. And we did that because [00:27:00] A, we sensed from speaking with people in the community and people who registering online that there was an interest in these areas, and B, the marginal cost to do it when we already had construction crews out there going down the roads right by, it was tiny. So I don't have the number in front of me, but for I would say less than a quarter of that we have served, we've been able to fill out some of what would otherwise be further Swiss cheese holds up in that area. And just anecdotally, there's this one small road [00:27:30] that I think had maybe 20 homes on it, and I noticed it because we parked right by it for the Memorial Day Parade a couple of weeks ago. And then I was looking in the orders and that small road had I think four orders of people in. And so it's a great example of where even though there is cable, it doesn't mean there's no demand. I

Ry Marcattilio (27:50):
Think that's a particularly good point to underscore. Yeah, almost done with the phase two, you've started phase three. Can you give us a sense at all of the size of this project, like Maple Broadband will do [00:28:00] X dollars worth of infrastructure by the time it's all said and done, or at least what percent of your build phases one, two and one and two represents as a whole? Yeah,

Ellie de Villiers (28:10):
That's a good question and it's a little bit hard to answer this exact point in time because I'm trying to figure that out at the moment. And the reason being that when we're done keeps changing. So I mentioned earlier universal service and universal service when we first started was a much bigger ask than it is now. The reason being that also last year, [00:28:30] go net speed built substantial portions of the areas that we built in some of the towns and their footprints, and then also consolidated with their FIM fiber brand. They built out one of their wire centers, which is the entirety of the town of Middlebury and Ripton, and I believe most of Salisbury as well, town of Salisbury. So a lot of what needed to be built when we got started actually no longer needs to be built. And so the remaining bit is actually a little bit unclear.

(28:55):
We're the state of Vermont just last week released its final list of eligible BEAD addresses, which [00:29:00] we're going to go and compare to the remaining addresses according to the public service department. Of course, I mentioned earlier that we are going to be applying for a BEAD grant, but regardless, the Venn diagram, that's the intersection of those two is our universal service plan that we plan to build in one way, shape, or form. And then the other B BSLs, well, maybe we build them, maybe we don't, depending on what happens. As of now, we are probably in the range of 80 to 90% complete in terms of where we started and what will be live [00:29:30] in a couple of weeks versus how much more we have to build. So that's a rough guess, but just to give you a

Ry Marcattilio (29:33):
Sense, I appreciate that. I appreciate also that it's always a moving target, filling in on that

Christopher Mitchell (29:38):
As everyone has an option. You are a nonprofit organization, presumably you are planning on being sustainable financially, which means that hopefully there will be actual extra revenues. And so you'll have to choose between, I suppose, giving those to the towns or lowering your prices or expansion. And I'm just curious if there's been any discussion about that. It's always, I feel like people never want talk about that [00:30:00] too early. It seems too hopeful, but I'm just curious if there's any thoughts along those lines.

Ellie de Villiers (30:05):
Not really further than what you've said. We've talked about it as a governing board because one of the things that the governing board has to do is to be making these decisions down the road. So originally, I should say originally original vision is that we wanted to have fiber everywhere, but then it didn't take too long to realize that that may not actually be the best use of our funding depending on what our take rate is when we're competing one-to-one with another fiber provider. And [00:30:30] as you mentioned, we are a nonprofit and even with all the grant funding, we are actually not the low cost provider. The reason being that our prices may drop over time, but we kind of need to figure out what our cost base is in terms of our overheads and our operating costs and what our financing cost is to build the last little bits.

(30:48):
Because even with all the grant funding, most of our network are in these areas that were historically either had no business case or had an insufficiently strong business case, and prices tend to be sticky downward. [00:31:00] So we're keeping our prices where they were in the original business plan for now, and we will see, but we have had that conversation with the governing board just to be very clear that a simple choice that we could make say around a year and a half from now is, okay, do we say that our network is our network and we drop our prices to be able to cover maintenance and expansion and things like that, and essentially just cover costs with a little bit of a rainy day fund, or do we keep prices a little bit [00:31:30] higher, invest more in affordability programs for those who really can't afford and or start developing a war chest so that if in the future one of the areas where we don't have fiber service, if the fiber service of the competitor declines or the prices go up or something else bad happens, then we actually have the resources to be able to go and compete in that area.

(31:54):
Again, I think you were one of the ones who said that you don't like the term overbuild because it's really just a term for competes. [00:32:00] So I try and use the term competes.

Ry Marcattilio (32:02):
So we've talked about this a little bit, but just to hit the nail on the head, one of the problems that the cuds faced early on, one of the challenges I should say is that you are looking at a universal service mandate. Hopefully I've got that right. And then also though a patchwork of coverage, some of it copper, some of it cable, maybe a little bit of fiber from the existing providers in that area. And so you face a particularly pronounced version [00:32:30] of this Swiss cheese problem. At the same time you mentioned consolidated is now moving into more fiber. Go net is responded with fiber. To what extent do you think, and we're still in a pre BEAD world by the way, none of the BEAD funds have been dispersed yet. So to what extent do you think maybe it's too dramatic to say that the Go Nets and the Consolidated are trying to rush to get through the door to invest in fiber to protect their existing territory directly in response to [00:33:00] the CDs, which the state has put a bunch of money behind, and has made it pretty clear that this community centered solution is going to be the framework by which it solves this problem.

Ellie de Villiers (33:10):
I'm of course not sitting in the boardrooms of those companies, but I do think it's pretty indicative that after, not after spending years and years and years not putting down a meter of fiber, all of a sudden in 2023 when CDs got construction money, all of a sudden, at least in our district, we had large swaths that were also the beneficiaries of fiber rollouts. [00:33:30] And one of the other things which was interesting is in contrast to EC fiber in the early days when they were really the only game in town, we have the interesting situation of being the challenger and being the nonprofit, but also not being the low cost provider. And so one of the other things that happens is that sometimes we encounter people who say, well, why should we choose you? The other guy is cheaper. And I said, well, that's fair enough.

(33:54):
But you have to understand that it's a wonderful thing that you have a choice because a number of years ago, if you recall, you [00:34:00] didn't have a choice. We weren't here. They weren't here. You have neighbors in other parts of the district that still don't have a choice, and we need money to be able to reach them. And I have to say, people will make their broadband purchase decision for a variety of reasons. Price is one quality, and having a local company that and trust brand is really important as well. People are on fixed incomes or lower incomes. I certainly don't fault anyone for choosing the cheapest option. That's a very sensible economic decision. But for those who do have a little more discretionary income, [00:34:30] the arguments that I just put forth does seem to be pretty compelling to a lot of people.

Ry Marcattilio (34:35):
We mentioned BEAD a second ago. I'm curious, did you guys participate in the BEAD challenge process for your state? We

Ellie de Villiers (34:40):
Did a little bit, but really not too much. I think that the data in our area was for the most part, fairly clean. I'm not sure what the others did in terms of some of the broadband serviceable locations that were marked as unserved underserved, where either there maybe was already service or where there was planned service. So I'm [00:35:00] waiting quite eagerly to see what spits out on the other side of that. But for us at least, we were working very closely with the broadband board because the areas that were excluded from our district were areas there were enforceable commitments either under ARPA, which was us. So obviously we knew what those addresses were, they knew what those addresses were or go net speed opted into enhanced acam. And so every single address in those four towns came off the map. And then as I mentioned, much of middleware Rifton was built out, so there was actually really not that much to be doing for us in particular in the challenge [00:35:30] process. Although I did challenge one C that was a trailhead in Eastern Salisbury because it did not meet the definition in volume one of a community anchor institution where people gathered, because I imagine it was pretty rare. People gather at a trailhead in East Salisbury,

Ry Marcattilio (35:47):
They don't get to count animals, the wildlife wandering by, okay, mosquitoes gather. Yeah, right. I think one of the reasons maybe that, and that's something that I've heard elsewhere [00:36:00] in the state of Vermont, I think maybe one of the reasons that you guys were in a little better shape than other places that we've seen the BEAD process challenge process play out, where it's been a nightmare would be generous as a way to describe it in some places is Vermont's state problem maps have been, I think, better. They were worked on much earlier, and there were mechanisms through which the UDS could tell the state, look, this ISP is claiming service here, but we know in fact there's not good coverage or [00:36:30] these are areas where we need to go. That's a story that I think we heard a few times for the report,

Ellie de Villiers (36:36):
And we've been lucky as well in our district that none of those things are happening in our district, at least not that I'm aware of. And so the bigger challenges we have when it comes to BEAD is these addresses that the FCC thinks are broadband serviceable locations that are actually abandoned buildings or trailhead or hunting camps that are three miles up the road in the Green Mountain National Forest that are seasonal. And so that's [00:37:00] a national challenge that's not unique to us.

Ry Marcattilio (37:02):
So as we wrap up here, I think one of the question I wanted to end on is the same as one of the themes that we drew out from talking to the CUD leadership and the state folks for the report, which was, well, the first question is, am I right in remembering that you've got some sort of infrastructure background?

Ellie de Villiers (37:21):
Yes. So I actually started on the wireless side. I started in Wi-Fi and then I moved into fixed wireless, and then I started working for a multinational fiber company and affordable access. So [00:37:30] I've kind of seen it all. And also I've seen a bit of policy as well in different African countries.

Ry Marcattilio (37:37):
So that's what I thought. I think that's one of the reasons the CUD model has been as successful as it has been up to date, which is leadership by folks who've got familiarity with this particular thing. But at the same time, you mentioned when you joined the board, I think as an alternate, in other words, it was a volunteer proposition early on, and that is definitely the case throughout the other CDs is a [00:38:00] strong thread of volunteerism folks being willing to give up five or 10 hours a week or even more oftentimes, especially early on to see this project through in the place where they live. Is that something that you guys are still looking at as happening in A-C-C-U-D or I know that as you move towards actually building and operating that the workforce begins to shift?

Ellie de Villiers (38:22):
Yeah. Well, that's a great question, and I was actually one of the knocks on CDs. People were saying, oh, you have these organizations that are run by volunteers. What [00:38:30] do they know? And to be honest, when I first moved here, I had the same concern as well because it works, but only if you have volunteers who kind of do have some experience and know what they're doing. So our CUD was very lucky in that. I mean, obviously I had a background, our chair had a background in inside plants, and he still volunteers quite a lot. And we had a woman who was involved early on who had financed large telecom projects and Wall Street, and so she helped to move the business model and the business case and some of the presentations we were trying to get our construction grant, so we were very lucky.

(39:00):
[00:39:00] But I mean, even now we have both our chair and our treasurer have positions that have small stipends available to them, but the people put in way more hours than what the stipends pay for. And again, I think this is, honestly, I think it's by choice that if we have the financial strength that if we needed to pay for this, we could, which is great, but it's also wonderful to have the sort of community involvement, and it's not just people putting in a lot of hours, people putting in small numbers of hours, coming to the governing board meetings, but acting as liaisons to the towns and to the community and where we need.

Ry Marcattilio (39:29):
Yeah, I think [00:39:30] certainly there's something to be said for the lightning in a bottle of the right people at the right place at the right time, but at the same time, they made it relatively easy for those of you who have some infrastructure experience or infrastructure adjacent experience to step into leadership roles and then invest you with the tools that you need to get the job done. Yeah, I

Christopher Mitchell (39:52):
Don't know, Ellie, I was looking for, I alone solved it. They were a disaster, and I came in and I've fixed everything. Now you're going [00:40:00] to fix the whole state. We could use some more arrogance from you, I think.

Ellie de Villiers (40:05):
Well, I have saved money in one or two places.

Christopher Mitchell (40:10):
There we go.

Ry Marcattilio (40:12):
Well, thank you very much, Allie. Appreciate the conversation and looking forward to continuing to watch what it is you folks are doing over there. Chris, do you have any parting questions?

Christopher Mitchell (40:21):
No, I mean, I'm so thrilled. I mean, I've been doing this for 18 years and we're in a position now where Vermont has embraced [00:40:30] this, and one of the things I just want people to walk away from is knowing this wasn't inevitable, right? This is the hard work of a lot of people. Some of them volunteers, some of them professionals, some of them for a long time. The nonprofit Valley net for all those years serving folks. So volunteering and also just choosing a job where you can work for good as well as for a salary as well, can make a difference. It's really exciting to be here now. And Ellie, it is great to talk to you and hear the story of how Maple Broadband, [00:41:00] how you got to where you are and where you're going. We're going to be talking to a few other CDs as well, but we just shouldn't lose track of this is very special and it wasn't destined to end up this way.

Ry Marcattilio (41:11):
Thank you,

Ellie de Villiers (41:12):
Ellie. Thank you guys. It's been a pleasure.

Ry Marcattilio (41:14):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts [email protected] slash broadbandbits. Email [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter. His handle is at Community Nets. Follow community [00:41:30] nets.org stories on Twitter, the handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly [email protected]. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you [00:42:00] to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through creative comments.