Town manager Jennifer Tabakin said the impacted area will include Castle Street, Railroad Street and both sides of Main Street from Castle Street to Elm Street.
"This is going to be a radical change for all us. Everybody’s talking about it."
-- Mount Washington resident Eleanor Tillinghast
"People may have ruled Mount Washington out before. But we just catapulted ahead of other towns in terms of amenities."
-- Brian Tobin, chair of the Selectboard
After decades of living in the slow lane of dial-up, DSL and rickety satellite connections, Egremont now has more than one company vying for the right to slake the town's thirst for the modern age.
While the broadband ball is now rolling, resident Jean Atwater-Williams said she wants to make sure everyone knows where that ball is headed and, in an article in the Sandisfield Times, called for a revote on the new route the town is pursuing.
Mt. Washington is going from almost no Internet and sporadic cell service to faster speeds than even Great Barrington, the nearest large hub town, which is served by cable but not at speeds high enough to support a thriving, 21st-century economy.
During the workshop, WiredWest will present, for the first time, a regional solution for operation of a broadband fiber-to-the-home network in any unserved towns in western Massachusetts that choose to join.
The towns of Sandisfield, New Marlborough, Monterey and Tolland decided to share the pain by hiring an attorney who helped them navigate a legal pathway that would allow the towns to bid out the construction of a fiber optic network and sign a 15-year contract with a service provider to operate it.
Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is quietly flirting with massive private companies like Comcast to deliver what will likely be inferior and expensive service to rural towns. “It’s a slow-rolling tragedy that will blight Western Massachusetts for generations.”
-- Susan Crawford, Harvard law professor and director of the Berkshire Center for Internet and Society
Great Barrington, partially served by cable, should get broadband downtown, something Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin has said she is working on. “Great Barrington is our business district. For the town to fulfill its potential, everyone in the business district needs fiber.”
-- State Rep. William 'Smitty' Pignatelli
So why could we get the telegraph and telephone service to rural Berkshire County in the nineteenth century but cannot get broadband today? What is the problem and what is the solution?
The town of Alford recently learned that the Massachusetts Broadband Institute will give it $270,000 and also reimburse it for half the cost of getting its utility poles surveyed.
The Massachusetts Broadband Institute paid $1.9 million to lawyers and consultants to undermine the WiredWest collaborative of 32 towns seeking to create a viable rural broadband, high speed Internet network.
“We are charting a new course that recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the un-served towns in Western Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Broadband Institute will therefore be moving to a more flexible approach.”
-- Peter Larkin, new chair of Massachusetts Broadband Institute
“I am confident that with genuine, open-minded collaboration, MBI and WiredWest can resolve our differences in planning for last-mile deployment."
--- WiredWest Executive Committee Chair Monica Webb
“Affordable broadband Internet is no longer considered a luxury but rather an essential utility. The need for broadband in the 21st century is often compared to the need for electricity or phone service in previous centuries.”
-- Mission statement on Massachusetts Broadband Institute web site
