The Connecticut State Broadband Office is a division of the Office of Consumer Counsel, the job of which is to advocate for the interests of the ratepayers of regulated utilities. The agency is being created as a result of the passage of Public Act 15-5 by the Connecticut General Assembly during this year’s legislative session.
The Connecticut Broadband Office will not a have any regulatory authority, said Elin Swanson Katz, the state’s consumer counsel. It will, however, require the hiring of an additional employee to meet the needs of the new agency, Katz said.
“They wanted this agency to be about consumers and how we could better meet their needs,” she said Wednesday. “Creating a new agency helps create a critical mass around this issue and legitimizes the focus.
“We’re trying to move the needle toward wider availability of ultra-high-speed Internet service through advocacy,” she added.
Even before the creation of this new agency, Katz’s office has been taking the lead for more than a year in trying to identify the need for ultra-high-speed Internet among state businesses and municipalities. That effort had been dubbed the “CT Gig Project.”
“We’re trying to identify aggregate demand,” she said. “Because once we do that, we can help bring private partners to the table to meet that demand.”
To further gauge the level of need for ultra-high-speed Internet in the state, Katz’s office has partnered with the University of Connecticut’s School of Business to create two Internet surveys — one for businesses and one for residents — which ask respondents about their Internet speed, cost, usage and satisfaction level with their options.
The effort to bring affordable, ultra-fast Internet to communities has evolved into three separate but parallel paths, Katz said.
Some larger communities such as New Haven and Stamford are negotiating with an Australian company, Macquarie Capital, to provide super-fast Internet service, she said. Macquarie is no stranger to Connecticut political leaders and utility officials, having owned the Aquarion Water Co. since 2007.
Some of the state’s midsized communities are looking at other providers to bring ultra-high-speed Internet service to their residents, Katz said.
Leaders of the state’s more rural communities are negotiating with the state’s dominant telecommunications service provider, Frontier Communications, and the state’s cable television companies to find a cost-effective way to bring super-fast Internet service to those communities, she said. Katz said some communities in the state still have dial-up Internet service.
“You basically have a duopoly in this state, and a lot of consumers are feeling unsatisfied about it,” she said.
Many rural communities across the nation typically have not gotten access to ultra-high-speed Internet service because of the costs associated with providing that service. Because rural communities have a lower density of homes per mile, telecommunications and cable companies have long claimed it is not cost-effective to provide those services to those towns.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 expanded the traditional goal of universal service to include increased access to both telecommunications and advanced services — such as high-speed Internet — for all consumers at just, reasonable and affordable rates. As part of that effort, the Connect America Fund was created to allow telecommunications service providers to recover some of the costs associated with bringing advanced services to rural areas.
©2015 the New Haven Register (New Haven, Conn.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
