Meeting Summary

These are NOT the official minutes, but here's a short summary. We did form the "Strafford Broadband Committee". The next meeting will be Tuesday, August 9 at 7PM at the Town Office.

Al & Laura Duey, from the Vermont Rural Broadband Project, talked about the approach taken by other towns in Vermont. In most (if not all) cases, a group in the community does a survey to gauge interest in town. The survey is sent to everyone on the Grand List and Voter Checklist, and requests contact information and 911 addresses from respondents who are intersted in getting broadband. (The Rural Broadband Project has funds to conduct these surveys and compile the results.)

With results in hand, we can then approach vendors (who get only 911 addresses, with strict prohibition on using them for anything other than engineering studies) and hopefully choose one to proceed with.

The committee has decided to proceed with a study, with the Selectboard's approval (given at Wednesday's Selectboard meeting). We hope to have something out in the next week.

There is some state money for the implementation of broadband projects in rural Vermont; a deadline for initial proposals is coming up in the next month, for the next round of funding. We will try to have something, but realize that we may not have enough information by the deadline.

Chuck Sherman also filled us in on his plans to proceed with bringing broadband to his home, in conjunction with Wavecomm, which already has some towers in the area.
Additionally, we're going to explore ideas with Ron Boehm of ValleyNet, who is interested in the possibility of joining with other vendors to provide the ISP portion of the services. We hope he'll be able to attend next Tuesday's meeting.

Feel free to join the committee, attend the next meeting, etc.

I'll send official minutes along when I get them.

And look for (and respond to) your survey when it arrives!

-- Nellie Pennington
nelliep@sover.net