Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 11/9/2021
NORTHAMPTON – During the Nov. 2 Municipal Election, Northampton voters widely approved a path to a Municipal Broadband network with the city, a concept that was already approved by the City Council and mayor.
With a tally of 7,426 to 705, the city is now permitted to establish a framework municipal light plant for creating a utility that could provide a municipal broadband network. Under state law, Northampton needed the council and mayor approval before allowing the city to vote. According to Mayor David Narkewicz, this was a project that Northampton began working on back in 2016.
As part of the fiscal year 2020-2024 capital program, the city included funding of $70,000 across two fiscal years to fund a marketing study and a feasibility study for municipal broadband at the local level. The city worked with an ad-hoc committee comprised of city officials and citizen advocates to put out Request for Proposals regarding those studies.
Prior to the election night, the city conducted its Municipal Broadband Marketing Study presentation with Design Nine - an engineering firm that the city hired to help with both studies - to provide residents with the results surrounding the marketing study. The goal after this presentation is to look at feasibility for a network and to develop a strategic plan for the city.
According to Andrew Cohill, a broadband expert from Design Nine, the COVID-19 crisis has created a much larger awareness for broadband in households and businesses. “Part of the goal of this study is to determine how do we get the right connectivity to everyone in the city,” said Cohill.
So far, Design Nine has conducted residential and business surveys, analyzed existing infrastructure and future needs, analyzed existing Internet Service Providers and what they offer, identified emerging fiber and wireless technologies and sought lessons learned from other cities who utilize broadband.
According to Cohill, nearly 3,000 Northampton residents responded to the residential survey that Design Nine conducted as part of the marketing study, which amounted to a 25 percent response rate. Eighty-seven percent of respondents are interested in faster, more reliable service, 82 percent are somewhat or very likely to switch to a city-developed network, 36 percent of respondents are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their current network, while 67 percent of respondents indicated that broadband availability is affecting where they choose to live.
“The mayor told us to expect a high response rate, and that’s exactly what happened,” said Cohill. “We’ve done about 40 of these in the last two or three years in other communities … typical response rate is anywhere between 10 and 15 percent. There’s very strong interest in broadband in Northampton.”
Meanwhile, more than 100 businesses in Northampton returned a survey with their thoughts on the matter. Eighty-six percent of business respondents want better internet access, 92 percent of businesses are somewhat or very likely to switch to a city-developed network, 33 percent of business respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with their internet provider, 37 percent of businesses need employees to work from home and 16 percent of businesses that responded are home-based.
The next steps, especially now that there is full support from the city’s voters to establish a municipal light plant, is to create a detailed analysis of costs for building the network, as well as a detailed analysis of costs of operating the network.
“We’re going to be putting together a very detailed business plan for the city to look at and evaluate with the decision-making process,” said Cohill.
In the business plan, Design Nine will be looking at an open access network model and look for any qualified Internet Service Provider that could use the network to deliver high performance internet. According to Cohill, based on the size of Northampton, there could be two or three internet service providers interested in offering services on the network. Residents and businesses would then subscribe to and package that best suits their needs. At this time, however, Design Nine is not recommending the city to become an internet service provider because this could create lawsuits from incumbents who are directly involved in a private internet provider.
In an open access network, Northampton also has the possibility of inviting one Internet Service Provider to take over the entire network, but Cohill argued that a better long-term solution would be to allow residents and businesses the opportunity to choose between a couple of different providers and create some competition, which can therefore lead to the possibility of lower prices.
“I like to talk about this as really building a digital road system,” said Cohill. “The city builds and maintains the roads that connect homes and businesses in the city, but they don’t own the businesses that use those roads to deliver goods and services.”