“I appreciate all that you’re doing. It’s wonderful but you know we’re just in the Forgotten Zone and it’s pathetic.”
— Town of Shandaken resident, name not given
The Citizens Commission for Digital Inclusion which Ulster County comptroller March Gallagher convened in May 2022 held a meeting at the town hall in Shandaken last week to discuss broadband, the fiber-optic cable which connects individuals to all the information so far compiled throughout the history of the human species.
There remain 1070 properties in Ulster County where the broadband does not reach. That number’s down from the 1300 last December. Ensuring that the coverage of high-speed Internet extends to all the people is the formidable task assigned to the committee.
That there remain properties beyond the reach of cable is primarily a matter of cost. In urban areas, estimates for laying cable are estimated at $60,000 to $80,000 a mile, or $1500 for each household passed. The price jumps anywhere from $3000 to $6000 a mile in rural areas.
With 2866 residents inhabiting 120 mountainous square miles, the rural descriptor fits the bill for Shandaken, where even cell-phone service struggles.
“I remember ten years ago or more,” recalled Gallagher, who chaired the meeting, “there was one pay phone in Shandaken right next to Chuck Perez’s garage. Verizon wanted to take that pay phone out of that location. Chuck Perez and I wound up getting on the phone, and he said to me, You know people use that phone all the time, you can’t get rid of it. Verizon said, Well, there was only 20 calls last year. Well, there were 20 calls, and 17 of them were to 911 because those people could not get a cellular connection.”
Since then, a number of cell-phone towers have sprung up throughout Shandaken and other service-deprived townships.
Gallagher debunked the idea that cell phones and cell-phone towers don’t require cable.
“I’m a lay person, and my vision of cellular was I call, my phone connects to the tower, and the tower shoots out into the air and reaches other towers. That is not how it works,” said Gallagher. “I call, it goes to the tower, it goes to the fiber backhaul, and that’s how my call is transported.”
Some 134 addresses within Shandaken still remain without broadband.
“Some of those properties are long-driveway properties,” said Gallagher, “so it’s not that there’s not broadband on the road. It’s that the broadband that’s on the road is too expensive to bring down the driveway. There’s this myth that only rich people have long driveways. I can tell you that is not true.”
Broadband competition
The advantage of those households who receive broadband versus those who do not is incontestable. It is the difference between having the ability to take part in the contemporary economic marketplace or being left in an era of fax machines and cumbersome, barely functioning briefcase cell phones.
One woman who did not provide her name spoke of the boon the Internet provides for education.
“I homeschool my children, and so Internet access is really important to us because we do a lot of our learning through online resources,” she said. “But that’s us a homeschooler. I know that during the pandemic a lot of the children that are schooled, you know, through the Phoenicia Elementary and many other schools also had to access their education through online portals. Many people did not have access many people had to drive places to get free wi-fi.”
Gallagher was able to boast about the commission’s involvement in getting broadband to Phoenicia.
“One of our commission members, the town supervisor for the Town of Olive, Jim Sofranko, said, Hey, did you guys hear that Margaretville Telephone is running fiber from Zena Road out to Route 28 to Delaware County? He brought us together with the company, and we learned that they were going to be implementing this middle-mile program that was going to run fiber, which is going to create competition for Spectrum, which is terrific. More importantly, though, we were able to bring them together with [Shandaken town-board member] Robert Drake and the Town of Shandaken, and they were able to bring fiber through Phoenicia. There is now broadband in Phoenicia that hadn’t been there previously as a result of this work.”
The Phoenicia Library, which had service through the regional library system, struggled to provide public service during the pandemic. “They just didn’t have the bandwidth,” said Gallagher, “and they could not get Spectrum there. When advised of the problem, Margaretville TC looked at the situation and said, Well, that’s just a loop, we can do that.”
The introduction of a local broadband competitor into Ulster County is a big deal. Owned by Charter Communications, Spectrum had been able to dictate the terms for broadband cable service until the recent introduction of Archtop in the Town of Ulster and Fiberlinc in Saugerties.
Big Indian resident Beth Waterman heaped praise upon one of Spectrum’s competitors.“I am fortunate that I have service on Mountain Road because Spectrum stopped halfway up and wouldn’t expand,” said Waterman. “But Margaretville Telephone stepped in and saved that, so I have good fiber optics. But I still have no cell service.”
Internet service no luxury
Ulster County and the companies which lay the cable are stuck in a waiting game while federal funds to Ulster County to aid in extending cable to the last mile are allocated. It was announced in late June that New York State would receive $664,618,251.
The size of the slice reserved to Ulster County remains to be seen. Gallagher predicts the state will handle the administration of the work needed to be done from Albany, and that the county won’t see any money at all “It’s possible that the state will just RFP [Request For Proposals] it statewide,” says Gallagher. “That’s what they did last time and they did a terrible job. They contracted with Huesnet, who basically did nothing and got paid a lot of money.”
Whatever is received will be more than what would have come in had the commission not created an accurate map of the connectivity situation. Based on that map, Ulster County was able to submit a bulk challenge to the Federal Communications Commission broadband map which had identified only 435 lack-of-service challenges and 165 missing-location challenges.
County executive Jen Metzger had commended Gallagher and the commission for their work to identify broadband service gaps across the county.
“High-speed Internet service is not a luxury in today’s world,” said Metzger. “It is essential to accessing educational and job opportunities, healthcare, and other vital needs — and my administration is committed to working with the county comptroller’s citizens commission to expand connectivity and close the gaps.”
Additional obstacles were discovered beyond the efforts it took to create the map. There exists a population which has been left behind totally from the information revolution.
Commission chair and Denning resident Jenny Lee explained.
“In helping individuals one-on-one by telephone,” said Lee, “we learned that many of them lacked the ability to use the Internet, lacked very basic skills, like you know, What is your desktop? What is your cursor?”
Technological skills tend to correlate with age, income level and literacy.
Lee found talking with the unskilled very touching. She identified what she referred to as “a very negative cycle that goes on when somebody doesn’t have the correct tools and knowledge and ability.” They get frustrated, and become even more frustrated when they share personal narratives about how they’re trying to get Spectrum.”
And so the educational purpose of the commission has expanded.
“During the Internet access survey,” said Gallagher, “there’s also another barrier, and that’s language. And again, age and literacy. We have to include the opportunity to train people in digital literacy. and we have to do it not just in English and not just in Spanish but in K’iche, which is not a language I was even familiar with but is very common in the immigrant population in Kingston.”
K’iche is a Mayan language spoken in some South American communities and in Kingston, mostly among immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala.
Waiting for the money
Even with funds assured, county planning director Dennis Doyle counseled the need to be proactive in pursuing interim solutions to solve connectivity issues.
“Anything that we do at the level that involves state and federal government, the time frames are long,” said Doyle. “We don’t anticipate that plan will be done until the end of this year, and then you’re looking at a substantial amount of time before that money will start to roll out.”
Until then, the message remains identifying opportunities for inclusivity. Accessibility is the key, and connectivity is the watchword.
“The county is going through a budget process .… Now is the time to start to ask it so if you have the sense that there are public places where wi-fi will be a benefit,” said Doyle, “whether it be a library, a town hall, a fire department or something of that nature. Now is the time to tell us, and we can start to look at how that works from a budget standpoint.”
Another thing that came to light during the outreach to make the map, said Gallagher, “was that there’s some people who are really, really poor. They are struggling with just basic needs, and they can’t afford even like $25-a-month broadband, and you know that it costs a lot more here.”
For those already connected but struggling to pay for Internet, which coming from Spectrum approaches $90 a month, there is the option for customers to save $30 a month by enrolling in the FCC’s affordable connectivity program at www.getinternet.gov. Qualifications for the subsidy are broad, and most residents earning less than 200 percent of the area median income will qualify.
The next digital-inclusion town hall meeting is scheduled for the Kerhonkson firehouse at 6 p.m. on October 11.
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