Why ECFiber requires conduit but can't pay for it: an email to a neighbor

Let me try to give you chapter and verse on conduit and ECFiber.

Fiber cable consists of very fine tubes of glass, so when buried, they need to be in conduit that is buried a couple of feet deep, unfortunately.?

We probably have about 1,000 potential customers among the 25,000 locations we pass who simply can't afford to install the necessary conduit. It's a problem that we are acutely aware of and trying to find a solution to, whether that is in the form of government grants, or fiber designed to be put in the ground without conduit. It'd be better to have 9,000 customers instead of 8,000, that's for sure. So you are far from alone, why, just the other day I took a spin around my block -- 22 houses -- and 10 of them have their wires in the air from pole to side of the house, while 12 have all the wires underground. And not necessarily underground in conduit that can be repurposed for ECFiber.

For example, your Comcast cable is made of copper surrounded by thick soft white plastic, wrapped in hard black plastic, and then put inside a rubberized plastic orange tube. This is "direct bury cable" and doesn't have to be very deep. It can't be used for fiber. You cannot pull the coax out of the orange sheath and use that. It may also be the case that your electric wire and old telephone wire are also direct-bury; like cable, they are copper and not as delicate as fiber. We have seen some really funky things that the electric, phone, and cable companies can get away with that fiber companies cannot get away with.

In our experience, we rarely find existing conduit we can use if the customer removes whatever old wiring is in them. Occasionally we have been able to use conduit the phone company put in way back when, but most of the time it turns out to be too narrow and to have hard right-angle turns that cause the fiber to break.

So that's why, if you want to become an ECFiber customer, conduit will need to be installed. I attach a PDF that is available on this page of our website with full specs and the names of three area contractors who do this work all the time.?

As for why ECFiber cannot pay for this, you have to understand that ECFiber is the trade name of a business that is owned by a municipality called the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District. The district is formed by 31 towns, including Hartford. Since this local effort began back in 2006, we have been struggling to figure out how to bring broadband to areas which didn't have Comcast or any other cable company. The three towns which did, Woodstock, Norwich, and Hartford, were saved for the last. That is why it is only now, 12 years after we got our first customers up, that fiber is on the poles in our town.

We did all this without any government grants. We did it all on borrowed money. The economics of doing this are tough -- that's why Comcast didn't do it, they couldn't make any money on it. Part of figuring out the pricing was realizing that installing conduit was unpredictable cost-wise and so our policy is that underground work is the responsibility of the customer. Our least expensive service is $72 a month, if we funded conduit for everyone who needed it that would have to be $150, and nobody would subscribe so there would be no point in building the network to begin with. That's the bind we're in.

As I indicated at the beginning, this is a problem I've been trying to find a solution to. For example, one of my golf buddies is a retired Corning Glass executive and he put me in touch with the engineers at Corning who know all about their direct-bury product. It turns out to be designed for the more benign conditions of the midwest and south, where the soil is deep and rocks few and far between. They have no examples of its successful use in northern New England, so our construction team is unwilling to experiment with it. We've also looked into point to point wireless solutions, but they turn out to be twice as expensive as burying conduit, and over the long haul, need to have the electronics replaced every 5-10 years whereas the conduit and fiber inside it are one and done.

Really my only success in this realm was helping us get a grant to install conduit at 12 manufactured home parks during the pandemic using the COVID Relief Funds the state got from the federal government. I've been talking to other agencies about different programs which would means-test private homeowners and small businesses, but so far nothing has gained traction. I did manage to get some language into the NTIA guidance on the grants that will be coming in 2025 from the "infrastructure bill" that should allow for such programs, but we are 3-4 years away from seeing that come together.

I hope this answers your questions. Please feel free to share it with your neighbors.