An Alabama company wants to spend $250 million building fiber connections in over two dozen Massachusetts towns, including Quincy, Beverly, and Haverhill. But the company, GoNetspeed, claims that burdensome local regulations are getting in the way.
GoNetspeed provides broadband services in eight states, including Maine and Connecticut. These states have a streamlined process for broadband companies seeking to hang optical fiber lines from local utility poles, allowing for quick deployment. Now the company is lobbying Massachusetts legislators to adopt the same approach here.
GoNetspeed president Richard Clark said that in Massachusetts, “there are a lot of communities that are underserved … we saw that landscape as a place to grow our business.” While nearly all Massachusetts communities offer broadband access, a single provider often monopolizes the market. For instance Comcast Corp. is the only broadband provider in nearly all of Quincy, while nearby Boston offers service from three carriers — Comcast, Verizon, and Astound.
But getting permission to enter an underserved broadband market isn’t easy. Companies like GoNetspeed must run their wires on the same utility poles used by electric utilities and other telecom companies. By law, these utilities must grant access to the new provider. But first comes a time-consuming process called “make-ready.”
The utility company that owns the pole must inspect it to sure it’s sound, perform any needed repairs, and make sure there’s space for the additional wire. After this, the other pole users, such as cable TV companies and fiber Internet carriers, must inspect their connections and modify them if necessary. This process is repeated for hundreds or thousands of poles. Only when it’s completed can the new broadband company start stringing cable.
Earlier this month, during a hearing at the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, GoNetspeed chief legal counsel Jamie Hoare said that it took 20 months to complete the make-ready process in Amherst before the company could begin attaching its fiber cables to poles.
By contrast, Hoare said that the same process takes just three to six months in Connecticut or Maine. That’s because these states use a process called “one-touch make-ready,” which allows the new broadband provider to hire a single outside contractor to do all the make-ready work at the same time.
Clark said that because Maine is a one-touch state, his company can run fiber past homes and business much faster. “We have built past approximately 125,000 locations in Maine and today we’ve built past about 17,000 in Massachusetts in the same timeline,” he said.
One-touch is common in much of the United States, but not in Massachusetts. But this may soon change. Two bills before the Massachusetts Legislature would make it state policy. In June the Department of Public Utilities and Department of Telecommunications and Cable will hold hearings that may lead to adoption of the new approach. And major utility companies including Eversource, National Grid, and Verizon say they’re supportive of the change.
Indeed, it appears that the only significant opposition comes from the Communications Workers of America, the labor union that represents thousands of utility workers. For years the CWA has opposed one-touch, saying that hiring outside contractors could mean fewer jobs for union members.
A statement from CWA said that the effort to adopt one-touch was “jeopardizing public and worker safety, threatening good local jobs and interfering with collective bargaining agreements.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.
