Project Update

January 2nd: Status Update

As 2012 begins, WiredWest is continuing to work diligently to bring the 21st century broadband to the doorsteps of our community residents and businesses.

Highlights for 2011 include:

- The WiredWest Communications Cooperative Corporation was established in August, and currently has 24 Western Massachusetts member towns that have passed the Municipal Light Plant legislation. Eighteen additional towns are in the process of voting and/or joining. Voting requires each town to conduct votes at two town meetings that must pass with two thirds majorities. So far, most towns have passed it unanimously or close to it.
- Bylaws and policy guidelines for the Cooperative were drafted and adopted.
- Approval of WiredWest Articles of Incorporation by the Massachusetts Secretary of State.
- The following groups within the WiredWest Cooperative were established to complete tasks and provide guidance to the project:
o Executive Committee
o Board of Directors
o Working committees
o Advisory Council
- Development of a working pro-forma. This 30-page document is a set of projected financial statements in a dynamic format that enables easy modification of inputs.
- Development of an FY 2012 operating budget
- Award of a $50,000 grant from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) to be used towards a market study, engineering survey, mapping, and procurement support.
- Award of a $2,500 grant from the Central Berkshire Fund.
- Pledges of $105,000 of matching funds and in-kind services to support the project
- Donations of $9,000 in direct donations and underwriting
- Development of a procurement plan for key vendors and services, as required under Massachusetts 30B, the Uniform Procurement Act.

Our ongoing work is focused on finalizing our business plan and its underlying assumptions, and completing tasks for the MBI grant. We will be issuing our first Request for Information for engineering services before the end of the year and also will have a new brand identity for 2012.

Plans for 2012:
2012 will be another busy year, focused initially on finishing the business plan and procuring partners for our financing team and operation of the network. We expect to have the business plan and engineering survey completed by April 1, 2012, and will keep you posted on key developments, especially progress on financing and buildout plans.

August 14th: Status Update

August 13^th was a historic occasion for many Western Massachusetts towns, which officially formed a joint cooperative to build and operate a state-of-the-art telecommunications network for residents and businesses. The new Cooperative – WiredWest – will create a community-owned network offering high quality internet, phone and television services to member towns.

Today, most WiredWest towns have only partial coverage from limited-bandwidth broadband technologies. Forming the WiredWest Cooperative represents our towns taking responsibility for ensuring we have the fundamental infrastructure to support future economic development and quality of life for residents.

Twenty-two Western Massachusetts towns joined the Cooperative, with 18 additional towns in the process of voting and expected to join the Coop over the next year. Founding member towns span four counties, including Berkshire County towns of Egremont, Great Barrington, Monterey, New Marlborough, Otis, Peru, Sandisfield, Washington and West Stockbridge; Franklin County towns of Ashfield, Charlemont, Conway, Heath, New Salem, Rowe, Shutesbury, Warwick and Wendell; Hampshire County towns of Cummington, Heath, Middlefield and Plainfield; and the Hampden County town of Chester.  See here for a map of WiredWest towns and their progress.

As part of the official incorporation activities, delegates signed a Cooperative Agreement, elected a leadership team to oversee the project, and approved the Coop’s bylaws. The incorporation took place in Cummington, a town in the geographic center of WiredWest’s territory, and was followed by a celebration attended by town delegates, legislators and regional broadband advocates. Pictures from the event are available here.

Now that the group is officially a legal entity, WiredWest’s focus is completion of a comprehensive business plan, raising financing and planning the network. The group recently received a $50,000 planning grant from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, and is raising additional local funding to assist with start-up requirements.

June 30th: Status Update

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) announced yesterday that WiredWest will be a recipient of their award program to advance last-mile broadband solutions. This award will be leveraged with in-kind services and additional funding to complete the planning process for the WiredWest fiber-to-the-premise network in its member towns in 2011 and 2012.

According to the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI), “grant recipients were selected through an open, rigorous and highly-competitive process.” WiredWest is pleased to have been selected as a recipient, and views this funding as critical to completing a broadband network design and business model that will serve WiredWest communities. Monica Webb, spokesperson for WiredWest, describes the award as “an important contribution towards creating critical, long-lived telecommunications infrastructure in the region.”

WiredWest is a coalition of 47 Charter towns in Western Massachusetts that are unserved or underserved by high-speed internet. As a community organization, WiredWest represents 27,000 households and over 3,000 businesses, and is working to design, build and operate a last-mile, municipal fiber-optic network offering internet, phone and television services to interested residents and businesses.

Under the MBI program, WiredWest was awarded a $50,000 grant, the maximum award amount. The primary tasks WiredWest will fund from the grant include completion of an engineering survey and cost estimates, procurement of vendors and professional services, a market survey, and purchase of mapping information for engineering purposes. In-kind services from regional advocates and organizations will also be utilized to complete these organizational tasks.

March 27th: Status Update

The WiredWest project can be broken into three distinct phases: 1) Planning  2) Pilot Projects and 3) Large-scale buildout.  We are in the planning stage now and are working on the following fronts simultaneously:

Overall Planning
A scope of work for the second phase of planning assistance, which will bring WiredWest to the point of soliciting financing for capitalization, and includes the creation of a comprehensive business plan, projected financial statements, preliminary engineering and town-by-town cost estimates and development of service provider relationships, has been developed. The first priority is the finalization of a business plan.

Governance
We have selected a governance structure which uses an existing Masachusetts statute allowing towns to establish Municipal Light Plants (MLPs) for the purpose of providing, among other things, telecommunications services. We have created basic bylaws and articles of incorporation. We are also assisting our member towns in taking the steps necessary to set up individual MLPs and then join the cooperative. The WiredWest Communications cooperative will also be an MLP. We expect to form the cooperative with approximately twenty-five towns to start, in the beginning of July, 2011.

Planning Phase Financial Support
WiredWest has received over $75,000 in grants and donations, in addition to significant in-kind support to assist with the first phase of planning. Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) and Franklin County Council of Governments (FRCOG) provided a combined grant for access to municipal legal counsel, mapping assistance and access to data in 2010, and FRCOG provided a second grant for access to municipal legal counsel for 2011.

In late 2010, WiredWest and Hilltown CDC created an agreement whereby Hilltown CDC will serve as WiredWest’s interim fiduciary, which enables the application for grants, management of funds, and issuance of tax deductible receipts for donations. Private donations have funded project counsel David Shaw, one of the country’s foremost municipal broadband attorneys. Donations have also been used to underwrite ongoing operating expenses.

We have prepared an operating budget for 2011.  We are working with Design Nine to further refine our business model and business plan.  Design Nine, an international firm specializing in municipal broadband networks has guided WiredWest’s first phase of planning, culminating in a comprehensive set of business and organizational recommendations. The first phase of Design Nine’s services were funded with the financial support of the MBI. WiredWest is moving forward with Design Nine working on a deferred compensation basis, for which WiredWest is seeking underwriters and grants.

Financing
WiredWest is working on a number of potential financing strategies, including:

• Local notes with capitalized interest to provide start-up funds;
• Grants and loans from state, national and private sources;
• Municipal bonds through the authority of the Cooperative;
• Loan guaranties to make bond offerings more attractive;
• Public-private partnerships

WiredWest is working with appropriate financial expertise to structure the business model and potential investment vehicles to be attractive to potential investors without placing undue pressure on debt service costs.

Technical
WiredWest intends to work closely with the MBI and their chosen network operator to ensure efficient utilization of the MBI backbone to accelerate availability of broadband in our region. We intend to build a high performance network and are comparing GPON, modified GPON and active Ethernet network benefits to ensure we build a cost-effective network that supports symmetric bandwidth and the delivery of business-class services to any location in the WiredWest region. In addition, WiredWest will work with wireless providers in order to overlay a robust wireless network on top of our fiber network to enhance mobile Internet access.

In preparation for network build-out, we are collecting and mapping detailed data on household and business locations, utility pole locations and ownership, and the availability of other telecommunications services on a household-by-household level.

Marketing and Strategic Partnerships
WiredWest is undertaking a comprehensive outreach effort to educate citizens, businesses, legislators and institutions in the region about the WiredWest initiative and its potential economic, community development and individual benefits. WiredWest will be also be reaching out to potential strategic partners.

Fundraising
We are in the process of implementing a fundraising plan which includes the solicitation of grants from businesses, foundations, and government, as well as donations from businesses and individuals throughout our 47 town region and in neighboring communities.  During the pilot project phase we will expand these activities to include seeking bank loans and issuing low-interest notes to private investors in Western Mass.

Pilot Projects
The next stage of WiredWest’s activities will be the creation of pilot projects. This is a critical step in our development, since the pilot projects will enable us to demonstrate that we can successfully build, maintain, and operate a fiber optic network.  They will also build our equity, create a revenue stream, and enable us to establish and test relationships with network designers and builders, network operators, and service providers. WiredWest has already developed criteria for selecting pilot towns. After the cooperative is formed, we will finalize these criteria and begin the selection process. We will also begin to raise money for these projects. Once the towns have been selected, detailed network design can proceed. Once financing is secured, the Pilot Projects can begin. WiredWest intends to make this transition in late 2011.

January 7th: Towns Move Forward on WiredWest Governance Votes

In September, delegates from WiredWest Charter Towns chose a governance structure to be voted on by individual towns. Governance is critical to formalizing the relationship between participating WiredWest towns and creating a vehicle to capitalize and operate the network.

The chosen governance structure for the WiredWest organization is a public cooperative, made up of member towns that have passed Municipal Light Plant legislation. Research on potential forms of governance was conducted by counsel and consultants with the assistance of WiredWest’s Steering Committee and delegates.

Municipal Light Plant (MLP) legislation is listed under Massachusetts General Laws 164, and was created over 100 years ago to enable towns to provide electricity. In 1996, it was amended to allow the provision of telecommunications services. The MLP option is advantageous to WiredWest’s efforts for a number of reasons, particularly the expediency of using existing legislation.

What Municipal Light Plant legislation means for towns
Passing the MLP legislation creates a new town department, and does not require a town to produce or sell electricity. The Selectboard can choose to oversee its MLP department themselves or appoint a three to five member board. This group is responsible for appointing a manager, making decisions around the town’s participation and representation in the WiredWest Cooperative, and filing annually with the State.

Creating the MLP incurs no cost to the town. If a town decides to join the WiredWest Cooperative, there will be a membership fee of not more than $1,000 per town. For a town to become an MLP requires a two-thirds majority pass vote of voters present, at two town meetings, two to 13 months apart. For further information, please refer to WiredWest’s information bulletin on Municipal Light Plant legislation, including the warrant article wording, and our Governance FAQ.

MLP Voting Progress and Schedule
Ten towns, including Ashfield, Charlemont, Egremont, Heath, Leyden, New Salem, Otis, Shutesbury, Wendell and West Stockbridge have successfully passed their first votes at special town meetings. The following towns have upcoming votes: Colrain & Washington, January 24^th; Conway, January 31^st; Warwick Febuary 7^th; and Great Barrington, February 9^th. Several other towns are in the process of confirming dates. These towns plan to hold their second votes at Annual Town Meetings in the Spring. All towns that have established MLPs by June 30, 2011 will be invited as founding members of the WiredWest Communications Cooperative.

Please see the map for the status of your town.

September 13th: WiredWest Delegates Choose a Governance Structure

On Saturday, September 11^th, WiredWest town delegates chose a preferred governance structure to be submitted for approval by individual towns. This critical project milestone keeps the WiredWest effort on track and positioned to serve residents and businesses once the Massachusetts Broadband Institute “middle mile” project is ready.

The delegates decided the organization would be formed as a public co-operative, made up of member towns. This structure was selected after months of research, consideration of 12 potential options, and recommendation from the project’s Steering Committee. Governance structure is critical to formalizing the relationship between participating WiredWest towns, and creating a vehicle to capitalize and operate the network.

Research on potential forms of governance was conducted by counsel and consultants with the assistance of WiredWest’s Steering Committee and delegates. Municipal counsel was provided with support from Berkshire Regional Planning Commission and Franklin County Council of Governments. David Shaw, of Kirton & McConkie assisted as project counsel for WiredWest. Shaw is one of the country’s most experienced attorneys in community broadband. Working with legal counsel and providing overall guidance was Design Nine, an international consulting firm with an extensive profile designing and building community broadband networks. Design Nine’s services to WiredWest are provided by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute.

A public co-operative enables WiredWest to move forward legally, practically and financially. Work on other aspects of the project, including engineering, business planning and financing, is proceeding simultaneously over the next several months, to ensure WiredWest is positioned to secure financing and begin construction as soon as enough towns officially join the Co-operative.

The WiredWest Steering Committee and town delegates will conduct extensive outreach on the benefits of a fiber-to-the-premises, open-access network, and the advantages of working together through the public Co-operative.

July 3rd: How the Stimulus Award to the Massachusetts Broadband Institute helps WiredWest

Governor Patrick and members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation announced yesterday the Commonwealth has been awarded $45.4 million in federal stimulus funding to expand broadband access.

The federal grant funding will be supplemented by $26.2 million in matching funds from the Commonwealth, bringing the total investment in the project to $71.6 million. This will enable a robust middle-mile network to be built by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) in Western and North-Central Massachusetts that will serve 123 communities. This wholesale network will bring MBI’s high-capacity fiber to the center of every town and connect Western Massachusetts community anchor institutions – town halls, fire stations and libraries – to the network. Even more importantly, it will provide the link to Wired West’s proposed last-mile network, enabling Wired West to extend fiber-optic connectivity to all of our homes, businesses and institutions in Western Massachusetts that desperately want service.

June 26th: First WiredWest All-town Meeting Convenes in Cummington

The 47 towns that have voted or otherwise opted to join the WiredWest organization formation discussions officially convened on June 26th for the inaugural all-town meeting in Cummington, just two days after the final town votes.

The first order of business for WiredWest is to determine the best governance structure, so that a legal entity can be approved by the towns. The research on governance options will be done by the WiredWest Steering Committee and the Governance Committee, with guidance from Dr. Andrew Cohill, a community broadband network consultant from Design Nine that has been provided by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, and a municipal lawyer provided through grants from Berkshire Regional Planning Commission and Franklin County Council of Governments.

Work on several other issues, including business model assessment, potential financing, needs assessment and network planning is also being conducted simultaneously by the WiredWest Steering Committee and other subcommittees, with guidance from Dr. Cohill, and input from legislators and other key regional stakeholders.

June 24, 2010: All Towns Ratify WiredWest Warrant Article

All towns have now passed the WiredWest article on their town warrants, and two additional town Selectboards – Egremont and Lanesborough – have also opted to join the discussions around the formation of the WiredWest organization. The total is now 47 towns.  See here for a map of the towns involved.

June 7, 2010: WiredWest Engages Services of Community Broadband Network Consultant

WiredWest has procured the services of Dr. Andrew Cohill, of Design Nine to work on the first phase of broadband planning. It’s estimated the work will take six months to complete.

Cohill is a broadband architect with an international reputation for his work advising large and small communities on technology and broadband issues. In the United States, he has worked with communities across the country, with recent work in New Hampshire, Virginia, Illinois, New Mexico, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Cohill is an expert in the design and management of community-owned and open access networks.

Founded in 1987, Design Nine offers a comprehensive array of technology advisory services, telecommunications project management, and network design assistance, and is one of a very few firms in the United States with experience in open access broadband networks.

The scope of work entails:

1. Needs assessment, review of related experience, bandwidth projections and demographic analysis for the region.
2. Governance and ownership recommendations
3. Broadband survey development and support
4. Pro forma business plan, recommendations for a specific business model, and a then year pro forma financial analysis that includes estimates for a full build out.
5. Funding strategies for financing the network
6. Incumbent and service provider strategy
7. An analysis of the value of pilot project study areas and accompanying costs
8. An Executive Summary of recommendations for leaders and decision makers and an extensive set of handouts and broadband education materials

Cohill’s services were made available to WiredWest by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI), whose mission is to bring broadband access to unserved citizens of the Commonwealth. WiredWest is grateful for the MBI’s support.

May 18, 2010: 33 Towns Vote to Join WiredWest Discussions So Far

In order to join WiredWest, 46 towns unserved or underserved by broadband are being asked to vote on their participation at 2010 town meetings. Over the past month, all towns addressing the issue have passed the article at town meetings – and The Egremont Selectboard has also chosen to join. There are 13 more town meetings that will also be voting over the next month. For status of your town, please see the map of participating towns.

Representatives from towns that opt to participate will form the initial governing board of WiredWest. Once all towns have had the opportunity to vote, the first meeting of the organization will be convened and pressing issues of governance and inter-municipal agreements will be addressed. We anticipate that meeting will occur at the end of June.

May 4, 2010: WiredWest Testifies to Regionalization Advisory Commission

On May 4^th, the Chair of the WiredWest Steering Committee had the opportunity to testify to the State’s Regionalization Advisory Commission (RAC), which is tasked with studying a range of opportunities, benefits and challenges of regionalizing local government services.

Please see our written statement here, which summarizes the WiredWest organization and efforts to date. We hope the RAC initiative serves to both streamline efforts and leverage state resources to benefit critical regional projects like WiredWest.

April 10, 2010: Regional Planning Agency Grants Will Provide Legal Assistance and Pre-network Planning

Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) and the Franklin County Council of Governments (FRCOG) are providing support through their 2010 District Local Technical Assistance Grants to further pre-network planning for WiredWest.

A feature of the 2010 grants is access to a municipal lawyer on staff at BRPC. Expertise in municipal law is critical to evaluation of potential governance structures for WiredWest, and having access to BRPC’s counsel expedites the governance work and provides considerable cost savings to the WiredWest project.

In 2009, BRPC provided similar grants to some WiredWest towns to assess any regulatory impediments to broadband technologies, in addition to mapping every utility pole in those towns, and structures where available, into GIS maps. Those maps will be used for network engineering, and by having that information early, it will save considerable time and resources in the network planning process.  As part of the 2010 grant, BRPC will use pictometry to overlay missing structures onto the existing GIS maps as well.

WiredWest is very grateful for the support and expertise of our regional planning agencies.

April 2010: Town Meetings and Educational Presentations

WiredWest is building a multi-town organization that will bring high speed internet to every resident, business and institution in the unserved and underserved communities of Western Massachusetts.

As part of building that organization, we are going to our member towns to ask that an article supporting a regional fiber-to-the-home broadband network be placed on the 2010 warrants. Specifically the article asks the select board to join with other towns to begin the process of designing, funding, and building such a network. Technically, the request is for the town to work with other towns to create the bylaws for an inter-municipal agreement, which the towns would then accept and therefore join a regional group. To date, most towns have placed the article on their warrant or will soon. See a map of participating towns.

In advance of town meetings, we will be offering educational presentations in each town to provide detailed first-hand information on the project. Email us for contact information of like-minded residents in your town and to help us educate your town.

March 2010: Google RFI

While we are in an early phase of organization, we are constantly monitoring all potential solutions for our region and are committed to exploring each opportunity. Many of you have written to us about Google’s plan to build and test ultra high speed broadband networks in one or more communities across the country. This is a trial project so that Google can experiment with new ways to help make the Internet better and faster for everybody. It is also a way for Google to test new products and services.

After careful consideration, the WiredWest Steering Committee has decided to submit, through the Google Request for Information residents and community groups portal, a statement about why the Google trial might be appropriate for our region. We will then follow that up with a more thorough document, providing more detailed information along the lines of what Google is requesting through its local government portal. There is a significant amount of data that we have in hand for the region that we can provide on behalf of the region. This will go directly to Google along with an outline of the WiredWest project.

Of course, no single town in our Western Mass Region will likely meet Google’s minimum threshold for its pilot project. But our region as a whole might. We encourage town leaders, broadband committee representatives, and residents to express interest in the Google pilot project by directly sending their own response through the Google residents and community groups portal. Please reference Wired West in your response so that Google is aware of the extent of our community support.

While we recognize that our submission is likely a long shot, the point of providing responses to Google’s Request for Information is to demonstrate demand in Western Massachusetts for broadband services, and in particular for a fiber to the home solution. We believe fiber is the only acceptable solution for our region and the only solution that will create a future-proof network to serve all of us for decades to come. An equally important point is to demonstrate that folks in Western Massachusetts want a broadband solution that is an open network, where any internet (and telephone and television) service provider can access the network to offer services to customers. This concept, which is central to the Google pilot project, is important to create the competition necessary to keep services affordable so that anyone who wants high speed internet can have it.

And finally, if any single town does decide to submit the comprehensive local government information, we request that they send a copy of that submission to The WiredWest Steering committee.