No cheers here for Three Ring Binder
To the editor:
The cacophony celebrating the completion of Three Ring Binder and its supposed impact on high-speed Internet in rural Maine rings pretty hollow to those of us who actually live and try to work in rural Maine.
The numerous articles appearing in dozens of papers across the state stating Three Ring Binder has brought us high-speed Internet couldn't be further from the truth. To date, Three Ring Binder has installed fiber optic cable on 1,100 miles where fiber already existed.
Companies such as Time Warner, FairPoint and others are already there. The assumption, quoted below from GWI's website, one of Three Ring Binder's originators and customers, simply has not happened:
“This will ensure competition and lower costs by enabling small competitive firms to offer service to rural customers with a lower cost of reaching the city than they could ever have seen before. Without it, it's unlikely that small companies would ever have sufficient scale to compete with the dominant phone and cable companies. This competition will drive down prices and drive up bandwidth as companies try to attract customers.”
These small competitive firms that are somehow going to pop up on the landscape like poppies in a field bringing high-speed Internet to our rural masses simply has not and is not likely to happen anytime soon.
For example, we now have another company offering DSL and fiber in the Calais area to customers who already have DSL and fiber. Hundreds of customers on roads like Route 191, 86, 192, 193 in rural Maine are no better off with Three Ring Binder for one very simple basic reason: Telecom companies look for 25 homes per mile to make it profitable to build out their networks.
If Three Ring Binder has enabled smaller companies to bring high-speed Internet to rural Maine, why are these companies competing in areas that already have high-speed Internet? Why aren't they truly bringing high-speed Internet to areas of Maine that don't have these connections?
Three Ring Binder has done nothing for those with slow or no access. And in cases where companies are branching out their networks, they often only do it when organizations like ConnectME give them public dollars to help with that last mile to the home or business.
I don't recall it mentioned during the building of Three Ring Binder that we are going to need additional public dollars to actually get that high-speed Internet signal to the citizens and businesses of rural Maine.
What is also lost along the way is the foolish notion that increasing DSL, cable and fixed wireless in Maine is preparing Maine for the broadband demands of today, let alone the future. This notion that Maine's economy will explode by expanding these connections is absurd.
DSL, cable and fixed wireless connections are being dumped all over the world because they are not capable of handling the traffic. The main backbone of the Internet is fiber. We are two-thirds down the road and we are finishing this race with outdated DSL, cable and fixed wireless.
In Maine, we are handing over public money to companies like Time Warner, FairPoint, Axiom, Pioneer and many others via ConnectME to expand these outdated technologies.
Why? I believe it's because Internet Service Providers can make a fortune sending an outdated signal across existing copper cables at the public's expense.
So the next time you see politicians, telecoms and others giving themselves a group hug extolling the virtues of Three Ring Binder, come on up to rural Maine. You will find a very different story here.
- Dan Sullivan, IT manager Woodland Pulp, Baileyville
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