Abigail Curtis

Maine resident Michele Richards has a problem that will resonate with other Mainers who live even just slightly off the beaten path: the internet at her house is so slow that it’s affecting her ability to do her job. Richards, who works remotely, needs to be on the computer all the time. She and her husband Jeff pay $70 each month to Consolidated Communications, the only internet provider to serve their road. In return, they’re supposed to get maximum download speeds of 10 megabits per second, but the internet that comes to their house on DSL technology is usually slower than that.

A group of Waldo County (ME) residents is working to create an affordable broadband utility that every resident in Searsmont and four other towns should be able to access. The task force has been collecting data from residents and mapping the community's level of current Internet service, which members believe is low. To address this problem, Searsmont and the neighboring communities of Liberty, Palermo, Montville and Freedom have formed the Southwest Waldo County Broadband Coalition, which has a long-term plan of creating a municipally-owned public broadband utility.

Islesboro (ME) -- The offshore island community with just 600 or so year-round residents is trying to build an economic bridge to its future with technology, as Islesboro (ME) residents voted overwhelmingly to create a $3.8 million municipal broadband network. The new network, which would use an underwater cable that was run to the island in 2015 by Central Maine Power Co., will connect Islesboro to the statewide Three Ring Binder fiber-optic network. Vern Ziegler, the Islesboro town assessor and a member of the island’s broadband working group, said he hopes the new network will be operational sometime within the next 12 to 24 months. “Our project has been driven from the ground up by the people here on Islesboro,” he said. “I think the town is very excited about being able to move forward. The people have basically said, ‘this is what we want.’ … It’s nice when the municipal government can respond to the people’s wishes.”

Residents who attended the annual town meeting on June 18 voted 145 to 23 to authorize the $3.8 million bond to design and construct the network. "Hundreds and hundreds of hours of education, meetings and public hearings have gone into the project,” he said. “I believe that when the people got to the vote at town meeting, we weren’t going to sway anybody’s mind one way or another. People were either for or against it.” In the end, it wasn’t even close, despite the high cost of the project, which will be funded in part through subscriber fees to the network and in part through a property tax increase. For the 2016-2017 fiscal year, the tax increase for the broadband network will be just 6 cents per $1,000 worth of property valuation.