Category: Broadband

Ice Storm Damage Image

Ice Storm February 2023

Broadband, Consortium, News

Hopefully, everyone survived the ice storm. From speaking with some members, members experienced internet and power outages for many hours. According to news reports, in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and New York, high winds and freezing rains left some 900,000 homes and businesses without power on Thursday morning, according to Poweroutage.us. ComEd worked to restore power for over 23,000 households, mainly in our northern suburbs, after the storm hit.

There isn’t any information from the major news outlets about how the outage impacted many Internet customers, but the fact that there was an outage is unacceptable. Many communities with community-owned fiber-optic networks experience no downtime in similar weather because the fiber-optic lines were underground.

We checked with McHenry County officials to inquire if they had experienced any Internet issues. They experienced no downtime because back in 2015, they built their own community-owned co-op fiber-optic network, McHenry County Broadband Fiber Network Consortium (“Consortium”); now, their marketing name is 1447 Network, and put all of it underground.

If we had a free market in McHenry County, we would have experienced fewer or no outages with our Internet connectivity. The Consortium’s business model needs to be changed to provide a real viable alternative to our cable and telecom Internet providers in McHenry County. However, it has yet to, and thus our situation does not improve.

We can do better.

Contact your local elected officials. Make your story heard. Demand better infrastructure!

IFMC Renews Call to U.S. Congresswoman Underwood

Broadband, Elected Officials, Lauren Underwood, News

June 24, 2020 (Woodstock, IL) — In August 2019, IFMC reached out to Congressional Representative Lauren Underwood (IL-14) to discuss legislative amendments that could deliver more broadband internet to areas across her district, especially the most rural and underserved. Read more about it here: IFMC Petitions Underwood to Amend “LIFT Act”

Since then, Congresswoman Underwood has been busy pushing the issue with sending a letter to the FCC (Here), hosting a virtual roundtable with Federal Communications Commission and local stakeholders like school district officials from McHenry, Woodstock, and Harvard, and sending out her own mini-broadband survey. 

We wanted to show her our appreciation, provide a few updates, and encourage her to share our highly-prepared, professional and industry-quality survey on broadband in McHenry County (McHenry County Broadband Survey).

Read our letter to Rep. UnderwoodDownload

Honorable Representative Underwood,

We were delighted to see your recent virtual roundtable with the FCC, and your interest in collecting data related to broadband. Your continued efforts in improving rural broadband in Northern Illinois communities is greatly appreciated—thank you. It is our hope that with your efforts, we can see an improvement with bringing competitive high-quality cost-effective fiber-optic broadband to everyone in Northern Illinois and more.

Since our sit-down meeting last August, we launched our highly-prepared, professional and industry-quality survey on broadband in McHenry County. Our Broadband Survey was developed and reviewed by a team including industry experts, a web user interface and survey developer, marketing experts, government elected officials and administrators, and an attorney. The Broadband Survey is comprehensive in nature covering organizations and residential; location details like address and rural vs urban; the need for improved landline telephone, cellular, Internet, cable TV, or satellite service; the expressed importance level of Internet; current Internet Service Provider; type of broadband; cost of broadband; the download and upload speed; number of people in the household and the age breakdown; demographics; the willingness to use property taxes to fund the fiber-optic infrastructure; and the demand for fiber-optics. To date, we have obtained over 400 responses from households and organizations throughout McHenry County, and the overwhelming consensus is: your constituents are experiencing high costs; lack of competition; hidden fees; and inconsistent and inadequate quality of service. This problem cannot be fixed with the current FCC bare minimum definition of “broadband” and these negative experiences are coming from rural and urban Internet users alike.

In August 2019, we shared the IFMC Policy Brief on LIFT Act (H.R. 2741) with your office, we suggested changes to H.R. 2741, and/or any other bill, recognizing fiber-optics as the only and best one-time cost-effective investment that will lead to competitive high-quality cost-effective universal access to all homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions. To continue the focus on the inadequate technology, we will continue to waste and spend taxpayer monies on antiquated technology from for-profit companies that have no intention of providing competitive high-quality cost-effective universal access to everyone, as they have for decades. Experts agree symmetrical gigabit service through fiber-optics is a multi-generational solution to current and future Internet needs.

In February 2020, the State of Illinois released their Connect Illinois Broadband Strategic Plan, which has taken on several ambitious goals to be completed by 2028. It is in our opinion, the only technology that will achieve and surpass these goals is by investing in a fiber-optic infrastructure to all homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions within our communities. What better way than to align the legislature structure at both a federal and state level by making symmetrical gigabit the minimum standard of “broadband”? With implementing the recommendations from the Policy Brief, these goals can be achieved far easier and effectively.

Recently, IFMC has applied for the Illinois Connected Communities grant to seek funding for increasing our educate and build support activities around obtaining more Broadband Survey results. We are proud to say that we were able to secure nine letters of support from governmental and quasi-governmental organizations in less than two weeks—our allies and supporters already have heard our message and know community-owned fiber-optics is what we need. We hope your office will help us identify funding opportunities at the Federal level.

We also strongly suggest you take advantage of the superior work product of our Broadband Survey, by linking it on your website and/or distributing the link (https://survey.ifmc.co) to others in McHenry County. Our Broadband Survey identifies areas of McHenry County that are unserved or underserved by broadband Internet service, and to generally identify demands for fiber-optic broadband Internet service. Our survey is comprehensive, and honestly, your staff would spend 100+ hours to make anything as good. We have done the work for you, please use it. If your office can help spread the Broadband Survey, we would be happy to share our data, including testimonials, with you.

We are the eyes and ears on the ground pushing this issue forward. With our combined efforts, we have no doubt that we can make significant progress. We look forward to you reaching out with us and becoming a stronger partner.

Sincerely,

David Gutowsky

Rep. Underwood’s E-mail SurveyDownload

About Internet Freedom for McHenry County: Internet Freedom for McHenry County (www.ifmc.co) is a non-profit organization of community members joining together to drive civic action that will promote the improved use of fiber-optics to provide cost-effective, reliable, and high-quality connectivity to everyone within McHenry County.

Become a Member today. Support us.

Results of Woodstock Chamber Survey

Broadband, IFMC-Org-Related

IFMC has been coordinating with the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce and Industry to gather marketing data to assess the need for community-fiber. On an annual basis, the Woodstock Chamber conducts a membership survey to gather a variety of data on how the chamber is doing. IFMC was able to insert five questions as part of that survey.

The survey was advertised by e-mail and during the month of January 2019. For the questions below, there was 21 respondents out of 273 members.

While the survey is not perfect, it does give us some insights into what the business community wants, which is more reliable, high quality, and cost-effective broadband. This definitely leads to more questions, which we’ll be following up with a broadband survey to dig deeper.

Question: Do you think having reliable, high quality and cost-effective broadband internet service is essential for your business and a factor in fostering economic development in our community?
Question: How satisfied are you with your current internet service at your business?
Which of the following issues do you experience with your business internet service? (Choose one)
Approximately how much do you pay per month for Internet service at your business?
Would you like to see the Chamber advocate for reliable, high quality and cost effective broadband Internet in our community?
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AT&T Fiber coming to Woodstock?

Broadband
Word on the street is that AT&T is rolling out fiber-optics cable to houses in Woodstock around Madison/Clay Street area. We stopped and spoke with some workers and they said that they were coming in from Rockford to roll out fiber to all buildings in Woodstock that get AT&T via utility poles. This means, anybody who gets their AT&T stuff via burial won’t see this improvement. The workers said they had been there for a month or so rolling out fiber, and will probably be for many months. A point of caution is, AT&T is known for changing their mind in a minute, so, we will  see how far they get. We excited about the investment from AT&T in the Woodstock Community.
 
However, AT&T doesn’t fit the bill on so many things around Internet Freedom like Net Neutrality, bandwidth caps (1TB), privacy, costs (just increased again), and more. We should have had this fiber-optic network back by 2000, but they never delivered on it.  We praise AT&T’s upgrade for some of the residents, it doesn’t change our goal of getting cheaper, faster internet for all, because at the end of the day, AT&T will not provide that.

Telecos Want More of Your Money Without Accountability

Broadband

In a recent Op-Ed in The Topeka Capital-Journal written by USTelecom’s1 CEO Jonathan Spalter and NTCA’s 2 CEO Shirley Bloomfield wrote on Monday saying:

“Broadband infrastructure is essential to their [remote rural communities] full participation in a connected, digital world… Like electricity, broadband is essential to every American. Yet U.S. broadband infrastructure has been financed largely by the private sector without assurance that such costs can be recovered through increased consumer rates.“

Some of these companies have already collected billions in taxpayer-provided subsidies while failing to deliver promised upgrades in service. While USTelecom and NTCA argue broadband is essential in the modern age and should be everywhere, even they acknowledge the lack of performance. So why are they advocating that the same companies now be given more of your money to build out these non-existent networks to our houses and businesses in McHenry County?

For the past 25 years, these same telecoms have promised high-quality fiber-optic broadband if we give them just them a little more deregulation and a little more money. There is a reality to building and infrastructure project, to be sure. However, history has shown that these private companies want all the profit and benefits of being a utility without the necessary regulation that to hold them accountable.3 4 5

IFMC supports rural and semi-rural areas, like McHenry County, in achieving reliable broadband access, but we do not need these for-profit telecoms to do it. In fact, if the cost of this project is going to be paid by us, we should own the broadband infrastructure as our rural neighbors elsewhere do now. A prime example is the electricity infrastructure build in the 1930’s as part of The Rural Electrification Act of 1936. The money was drawn from public tax dollars for a program that directly benefited the public, creating 900 not-for-profit electric cooperatives in the process.