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OpenCape

    BITS

    Directing Rescue Funds to Broadband

    Officials need to decide if it is really worth it

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — A plan to extend a fiber-optic broadband network to 1,528 customers got a tentative green light from the select board last July 26. The idea was to use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to hire OpenCape, the nonprofit internet service provider, to extend its existing network from the Provincetown Commons along Bradford Street to the West End rotary and back along the entire length of Commercial Street to where it joins Bradford.

    The new loop would extend OpenCape service to 1,150 homes and 378 businesses. Businesses would pay $80 a month and other residents $55 a month, OpenCape CEO Steven Johnston said, and the service would be more reliable than Comcast’s.

    But most of Provincetown’s homes (76 percent) and businesses (62 percent) would still not be connected. And the price tag for the town to install the loop would be $825,000.

    The state legislature passed a bond bill in 2020 that included $1.7 million to extend broadband service on the Outer Cape, but Gov. Charlie Baker never released the funds. The Baker administration will not invest in broadband here, says Sen. Julian Cyr, because we already have Comcast service, which may be expensive, spotty, and unreliable, but is good enough, according to the Baker team.

    So, the Provincetown Select Board has endorsed the idea of using the ARPA funds, expected to arrive in the town’s coffers soon.

    Connecting everyone in town to OpenCape’s fiber-optic network would cost $11 million, according to Johnston.

    “That price tag is not possible,” said select board member Leslie Sandberg. But, she added, the Bradford-Commercial loop would be a decent first phase, made palatable by the ARPA funds.

    The select board agreed to continue researching that option. “I would like the opportunity to put together a plan,” said Sandberg.

    “I am absolutely for that,” said David Abramson, the board chair. “A lot of people deal in a lot of data, and they don’t have a lot of options. We need to pursue this further.”

    Billions of dollars are coming to Massachusetts to help the state recover from the pandemic. (See related story on page A1.) Guidance from the federal government gives states “wide latitude” on use of the money, Johnston said.

    These pots of ARPA money are separate from the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which will provide another $65 billion nationally to help policymakers beef up high-speed internet access, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

    Even though the pandemic relief funds sound like a gold mine, there are a lot of needs out there for this one-time cash infusion.

    Paul Niedzwiecki, executive director of the Barnstable County Chamber of Commerce, named the housing crisis as a top priority.

    The median sales price of a single-family home jumped from $410,000 in 2019 to $570,000 in 2021, according to the Cape & Islands Association of Realtors. Child-care options are both costly and minimal, which prevents parents from fully joining the work force in a severe labor shortage. Many are calling for universal preschool.

    Both of the bridges to the Cape require major repairs, Niedzwiecki added.

    Broadband remains one of the issues that people complain about, and it is essential to keeping Cape Codders working from home and students connected to teachers during shutdowns.

    “There is enough money to do something transformational,” Niedzwiecki said.

    But there is not enough to do everything.

    Comcast’s Monopoly

    The majority of Cape Codders have access to broadband, which is defined as a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second (mbps) and a minimum upload speed of 3 mbps.

    Comcast, which enjoys a virtual monopoly on the Cape, provides a combination of fiber and coaxial cable lines to nearly all Cape homes and businesses at faster speeds than that. Marc Goodman, a Comcast spokesman, said the base customer package, called “the performance starter/internet essentials,” has a download speed of 50 mbps and an upload speed of 5 mbps.

    A test of the Comcast internet service at the Independent’s Provincetown office at 237 Commercial St. on Jan. 17 showed a download speed of 350 mbps, and an upload speed of 41.5 mbps (though a lot of work happens from a home office not served by Comcast, where a test that same day showed a download speed of 2 mbps and an upload speed of less than one mbps). A tool provided on OpenCape’s website allows you to check the current speed of your internet connection.

    Johnston said if you continue to check the speed daily, you will see it slow down during busy use times in the summer.

    OpenCape’s fiber network is as fast as Comcast but more reliable, Johnston said.

    Still, Comcast seems to be good enough for most users, said Randy Hunt, a former state representative from Sandwich who worked to address internet complaints when he was in the legislature from 2011 to 2021.

    “You need to meet people’s needs, and Comcast seems to do that with their coaxial cable,” Hunt said.

    But many customers have problems with Comcast. Provincetown Select Board member John Golden said, “The service we get is dismal at best. On the Fourth of July weekend, I couldn’t even believe how bad it was.”

    “Everyone has a story about Comcast’s customer service,” said Niedzwiecki. Then there is the issue of Comcast’s prices.

    The base price for internet service alone is $65 a month, according to Goodman and the local service rate posted online. Most people also get television through Comcast; those packages often exceed $200 a month.

    The OpenCape Option

    Jill Stauffer, executive director of the Provincetown Commons, a shared workspace, said she pays $450 a month to have a dedicated symmetrical connection through OpenCape. It is well worth it, she said, because in three years the Commons has lost its internet connection just twice for brief periods and only in rare circumstances, like a car accident taking out a utility pole.

    OpenCape is a nonprofit that used $40 million in mostly federal funds to construct a middle-mile fiber-optics network up Route 6. When it was completed in 2013, the OpenCape founders discovered a serious miscalculation: they had thought private internet service startups would appear and would install the costly “last mile” connections between the network’s backbone and local homes and businesses. That didn’t happen.

    This misstep has meant that most people cannot connect to OpenCape. Hospitals, municipalities, and larger businesses have spent the money to get their internet from OpenCape because it is a reliable backup, Hunt said.

    OpenCape is getting creative in selling last-mile connections through plans like the one Johnston pitched to the Provincetown Select Board last July. This provides at least some competition to Comcast, which would otherwise have a total monopoly on the Cape, said Stauffer.

    Pamet Point Road in Wellfleet is among the rural roads to get Comcast service last year after years of complaints. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Perhaps it was this competition and loud complaining that motivated Comcast in 2021 to extend internet service to some rural roads that had been unserved for years. These included Pamet Point Road, Bound Brook Island Road, a portion of Old County Road, Pilgrim Road, and Old Hay Road in Wellfleet and Dorothy’s Lane, Long Nook Road, and Priest Road in Truro, said Goodman.

    Goodman asserted that only about 50 homes on Cape Cod now lack access to Comcast’s service. His claim could not be verified, because Goodman said the list of unserved roads is “proprietary” and he refused to disclose them.

    The trick will be to use the ARPA relief funds in an efficient way, Niedzweiki said. Cyr said OpenCape already provides internet to parts of the main streets in Hyannis and Falmouth for affordable rates. He said that could be a good model for high density areas like Provincetown.

    But for the residents of rural roads, the choices are less attractive.

    The Cape Cod Commission is about to put out a request for proposals to hire a consultant to examine what sort of internet service the Cape has now, what is lacking, and possible solutions (and associated costs), said Kristy Senatori, executive director of the commission.

    BROADBAND

    Bienvenue’s Wireless Fix for OpenCape’s Inadequacy

    His idea for a ‘mesh network’ would make residential hookups affordable

    By

    EASTHAM — The OpenCape Corporation’s high-speed internet service has been tantalizingly close and yet out of reach for most Outer Cape residents since 2013, when the nonprofit technology company used $40 million in grants to create a fiber-optic cable “backbone” from the Cape Cod Canal to Provincetown.

    Though more than 100 buildings, including schools, public libraries, town halls, and public safety facilities, have connected to the nonprofit service, OpenCape’s own website acknowledges that sky-high connection fees for individual homes put broadband out of reach for almost all regular consumers.

    “They’re not designed to roll out and operate with residential customers,” said Rich Bienvenue, Eastham’s finance director and assistant town administrator, at the March 1 select board meeting. “They haven’t even targeted them.”

    Bienvenue suggested that the town develop a wireless mesh network that would provide access points for residential customers to connect to OpenCape’s internet service. “To me, that’s the way to proceed,” he said. “There are communities in Massachusetts that have done this.”

    Buildings that are connected to OpenCape’s backbone can serve as anchors, Bienvenue said. “Instead of running additional fiber to every home that might be near those locations, we can distribute wireless access points,” he explained. “If you’re in range of an access point, you can then connect.”

    A wireless mesh network uses multiple access points in a radius, so, if one point goes down, users can connect to a different point to get back to the anchor.

    “Probably the site to start with is our DPW and build out from there, because there’s residential neighborhoods in that area of some density,” said Bienvenue.

    Select board chair Jamie Demetri likened the program to the town’s water enterprise, noting how costs were offset as more people connected. “I think the hookup demand would be pretty good,” said Demetri.

    “Some neighborhoods you make money on, some neighborhoods you lose money on,” said Bienvenue. “If you can quickly roll that out to all 6,000 residents, you have a much better chance of self-financing it.”

    A $1.8 billion I.T. infrastructure bond bill signed by Gov. Charlie Baker last August has $1.7 million earmarked for OpenCape to fund initiatives such as backbone extensions in Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro and expanded coverage in Provincetown from Bradford Street Extension to the West End Rotary and back up Commercial Street. But the funds have not yet been released by the state.

    Bienvenue suggested that funding from that infrastructure bill could be used to run a redundant strand of fiber-optic cable from the Orleans Rotary down Bridge Road to Herring Brook and Massasoit roads.

    “If one of those went down in a hurricane or some sort of storm, you’ve got a backup,” he said.

    While no vote was taken on Bienvenue’s proposal at the March 1 meeting, he said it had the board’s support.

    “It’s definitely something the board is interested in pursuing,” Bienvenue said. “I think this is something that we can do, and, if we’re successful, then we can easily adapt and roll this out to have a larger participation than just Eastham.”

    OP-ED

    Connectivity Is a Necessity

    The pandemic has made remote communication incalculably more important

    By

    The Independent has published articles about the problem of internet connectivity on the Outer Cape, and we are currently waiting to see the results of the latest round of negotiations with Comcast about its policies. I believe that a wired broadband connection should be considered a basic necessity and should be available to every home in our region.

    A number of homes in Wellfleet, where I live, have no Comcast cable connection available. That is also true in Truro. They have been left out of company plans because of their remoteness; Comcast deems them not profitable.

    I think most of the roads left out in Wellfleet are in or near the National Seashore. Comcast has gone around them, down other National Seashore roads with more dense and profitable development near the beaches. Connecting to OpenCape’s fiber optic alternative network is prohibitively expensive. Satellite and cell coverage are not equal in data strength, amount, or capacity for internet service compared to Comcast cable.

    Where we are, near the Truro line, the cell phone signal is also poor. Why do we allow complete dead zones in our towns?

    Comcast has reportedly offered to reduce its threshold for service from 25 to 15 houses per linear mile. In Wellfleet, at least, this will not fix the problem. I believe it would leave out an estimated 5 to 15 percent of all homes in Wellfleet. I have been unsuccessful in getting data or maps of Wellfleet’s coverage from Comcast or the town administration.

    A serious commitment to close this gap in service is needed. Our town governments should demand accurate mapping of Comcast service coverage and, more important, lack of coverage. Putting ink on a contract with Comcast requiring service for every household would allow students and all residents to access what has become a basic utility.

    This is an issue of educational, economic, and health equity. The coronavirus pandemic has made remote communication incalculably more important. After 10 years of fact-finding and advocacy, ever since the last contract negotiation with Comcast, I feel frustrated and forgotten.

    It has been difficult for my family to keep up and on track. Common amenities like nonmetered wi-fi, streaming, updating, Zoom, Netflix, online courses, live calls, and gaming from home, which most people take for granted, are not available to us. The amount of time and money I have spent on workarounds is much too much. Being separated from aging and ill parents during the virus outbreak has made it even more difficult. Add the lack of ability to do common remote work and school functions from home, and you can imagine how I feel.

    I hope this situation will be fixed within the next 10 years, or before the next public health crisis. It will never happen if we don’t make the effort.

    TECHNOLOGY

    Baker Withholds Funds for Outer Cape Broadband

    ‘We’re ready to rock and roll,’ says OpenCape director

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Gov. Charlie Baker signed a bill in August authorizing up to $1.8 billion in infrastructure investment, including $1.7 million to expand broadband coverage in Provincetown via the OpenCape fiber-optic network. But OpenCape is still waiting for the funds to be released by the governor.

    “We’re ready to rock and roll,” said Steven Johnston, the nonprofit corporation’s executive director. “If I got a text or a call from the governor right now saying we’re going to release that money, we would have crews start working on that immediately, because our goal would be to have that up and running in the spring or before.”

    The Provincetown plans include expanding coverage down Bradford Street Extension to the West End rotary and back up Commercial Street to create a loop reconnecting to Bradford Street in the East End.

    “It wouldn’t allow us to connect everyone, but it allows us to do some amazing stuff,” said Johnston.

    Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham are also in line to receive strategic extensions of the OpenCape network. Johnston said he would be meeting with local officials in those towns to work on strategy.

    “One of the places I’d love to get connected is Outer Cape Health Services,” he said.

    OpenCape, founded in 2006, maintains a fiber “backbone” along Route 6 all the way to Provincetown. Its broadband service has a higher bandwidth than the cable internet offered by Comcast, said Johnston.

    OpenCape currently serves municipal buildings and a few businesses. Aside from a residential experiment launched this year, however, Cape residents cannot link their homes to the fiber network. If the so-called last miles of fiber service on residential streets were constructed throughout the Cape, Comcast, with its spotty service, would need to compete.

    OpenCape has been advocating for release of the funds through a grassroots campaign of letters and phone calls from Cape residents and visitors. The Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates added its support last month with a letter urging the governor to release the funds.

    “Advocacy for the funds to be released is just a typical strategy,” said Wellfleet’s delegate, Lilli-Ann Green, at the assembly’s Sept. 16 meeting.

    “Even before the pandemic, we all knew that our cellular service and particularly our internet service on the Cape had been inadequate,” said Provincetown Delegate Brian O’Malley. “The impact of so many more people working from home, holding meetings like this all the time, clearly has been that the need for improved internet service throughout the Cape is so very much more apparent.”

    “It’s not just nice to have, it’s a must have, because the way we’re going to work going forward has changed forever,” said Johnston.

    Installing “last-mile” fiber-optic connections to the OpenCape backbone costs approximately $70,000 per mile. Some people are reportedly paying the price on their own.

    “Every time I connect a business or some rich person’s house that is four miles from my backbone,” said Johnston, “I have to build to them, and that allows me to extend fiber, that they pay for, out into the community. That’s a win-win.”

    While Johnston said that he is “always out talking to those seven- and eight-figure individuals,” encouraging them to follow Andrew Carnegie’s example of charitable giving, he said, realistically, the way forward to connect every home to the network would be for the towns to use their bonding authority.

    “It’s something where the towns really need to get behind it,” Johnston said. “The town invests in the infrastructure. They own the fiber that connects the homes together. They can buy fiber connectivity from OpenCape or from Comcast or both.”

    He noted that towns are now faced with a number of costly issues. “It’s just about where is this in the list of priorities,” said Johnston.

    TECHNOLOGY

    As Life Moves Online, Lack of Access Vexes

    Comcast’s ‘monopoly’ keeps others from serving the Cape

    By

    While debates about in-person schooling rage and doctor visits go virtual, Outer Cape towns are negotiating the next decade of internet coverage in the area. Contracts between the individual towns and Comcast, the Cape’s main source of broadband internet connection, are set to expire this winter.

    Due to the high fixed costs of cable internet infrastructure, Comcast has a natural monopoly on high-speed internet on the Cape. “Comcast is really the only game in town as far as lines and cables go,” Mia Baumgarten, chair of the Wellfleet Cable Advisory Committee, told the Independent.

    AT&T does not provide internet in Massachusetts because other companies own the cable networks necessary to do so, said Karen Twomey, the regional P.R. manager for AT&T and DirecTV.

    “Another company could come and run cables alongside Comcast’s, but is it profitable for them to do that if 90 percent of residents are on Comcast?” said Baumgarten. “It’s a monopoly.”

    Comcast is a monopoly, though, that many Cape residents can’t buy into. Many areas, especially in sparsely populated parts of the Outer Cape, have no cable service, and thus no broadband — and the company isn’t required to provide it.

    Former state Sen. Dan Wolf, founder and CEO of Cape Air, does not have access to broadband at his Harwich home. “There should be an obligation to deliver service even to places where it isn’t profitable,” he said. “If Comcast can’t do it, they should set up a reserve fund to pay OpenCape to do it.”

    OpenCape is a nonprofit headquartered in Barnstable that currently provides fiber optic internet service to municipalities and some businesses, with plans to one day serve private residences.

    “The only internet service I have at my home is an old-fashioned DSL over an old-fashioned phone line,” said Wolf. “My cell phone for work is T-Mobile, and very often I just stream off of my T-Mobile because the DSL is so bad. I can do email from home, but a lot of what we’re doing now is telemeetings, and it’s just too unreliable.”

    The Cape’s incomplete broadband coverage has prevented psychologist Edouard Fontenot and his husband from moving to Truro full time. According to Fontenot, who goes to friends’ houses to get work done, Comcast salespeople have said several times that they serve his area, only to look his address up and take it back.

    These are not isolated incidents. “I would say we have at least 30 homes that can’t get Comcast in Eastham,” said Town Administrator Jaqueline Beebe. “Some of those people have put up satellite dishes.”

    Satellite internet is available on the Cape through companies like Viasat and HughesNet. Though satellite is more widely available than cable or fiber in hard-to-reach locations, its speeds are generally much slower.

    In the past, a point of contention in towns’ negotiations with Comcast has been the number of homes per mile required for the company to provide service. Comcast’s standard to determine if providing service is financially viable varies. It is 25 houses per mile in Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham, and 30 in Provincetown, according to past contracts.

    James Paul Ludwig, a media consultant for Brewster, Truro, and Yarmouth who was involved in the last round of negotiations in 2010, said Outer Cape towns don’t have enough business to strike a bargain with Comcast. “Towns are always trying to negotiate that aspect of it. I’ve never thought it would work.”

    “Suddenly, what was a mere annoyance has become really critical for us,” Fontenot said. “As a health-care provider, it’s extremely discouraging and frustrating not to be able to transition more seamlessly into telehealth. Without broadband, it’s not doable. This is the thing that’s going to strangle the Cape from being a viable place to live after the pandemic.”

    It’s a pre-existing problem, Fontenot added, but the pandemic is “really shining a light on the way that people are not being served. In exchange for the capacity to be a monopoly, the trade-off should be that they be required to serve all areas.”

    Underserved, Not Unserved

    “The state of broadband on Cape Cod is uneven,” said state Sen. Julian Cyr of Truro. “We have antiquated service via a provider that has a monopoly on service. But we also have the potential through the OpenCape network.”

    OpenCape, founded in 2006, maintains a fiber “backbone” along Route 6 all the way to Provincetown. Its broadband has a higher bandwidth than the cable internet offered by Comcast, according to CEO Steven Johnston.

    OpenCape serves municipal buildings and a few businesses, including Wolf’s Cape Air. Aside from a residential experiment launched this year, however, Cape residents cannot link their homes to the fiber network. If the so-called last miles of fiber service were constructed throughout the Cape, Comcast with its spotty service would need to compete.

    Despite the hefty sum required to expand fiber access — $70,000 per mile, according to a 2019 Independent article — Barnstable County Administrator Jack Yunits remains hopeful. “We’d do anything we could to get broadband access going throughout the Cape,” he said. Yunits said the funds would be difficult to acquire through grants, “But I think we could do it in a revolving loan fund.”

    Most state funding for broadband improvements goes through the Mass. Broadband Institute (MBI). While Comcast’s hit-or-miss service is the only high-speed internet option on the Cape, MBI’s priorities are the 45 completely unserved towns in central and western Massachusetts.

    Marty Newell at the Center for Rural Strategies said that such funding difficulties are common in partially served areas.

    “A company can provide internet to one house in a county or census block and then declare that county served,” Newell said. “That means that potential competitors are locked out of a number of the grants and low-interest loans that Congress is so pleased about making available for rural America. Preference is given to unserved areas.”

    With the Outer Cape being underserved, state funding is not directed here. “I’m hoping that the pandemic puts pressure on cable companies to provide broadband access, the way we think of water or electricity as a human right,” said Mia Baumgarten. “I have my fingers crossed, but I can’t say I’m hopeful.”

    Olivia Weeks’s summer fellowship with the Independent is supported by the Harvard Alumni Association and the Harvard Club of Cape Cod. Carolyn Komatsoulis contributed reporting for this article from Boston.

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