Larry Parnass

For the last decade in Western Massachusetts, closing the digital divide meant getting fiber, cable, or wireless service to every address.

Windsor's (MA) go-to broadband leader, Doug McNally, found himself sitting this past week with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. Not long after the introductions, Chairman Pai quoted a word McNally used to describe the impact of a newly won FCC grant. "Lifesaver," McNally had said. This past week, the former educator and current Select Board member added another description of the $886,172 grant his small Berkshire County town will receive in installments over the next decade: "Game changer." 

A May court order requiring continued operation of the state's $90 million "middle-mile" broadband network remains in effect, despite an effort to quash it.  That development comes as the arcane legal dispute mushrooms, nine months after the network operator's surprise bankruptcy filing.

In January, a tech consultant from the broadband dead zone donned his pamphleteer's cap. In nine fiercely argued pages, Stephen E. Harris went hard after a multi-million dollar question: Why was the Massachusetts Broadband Institute holding back money for design and engineering services — originally $18 million for all unserved towns, or 45 percent of MBI's bond funding — from towns that want to build their own networks?

A kind of Tom Paine for the 21st century, Harris put his argument into his study's title. "Last Mile towns must control all of their broadband funds," he called it. He shipped copies to area lawmakers and to many of the town broadband committees trying to close the digital divide. Weeks later, when MBI officials convened a community forum in Worthington (MA) in Feb, they heard a common refrain. Towns desperate for last-mile broadband connections, speaker after speaker said, ought to get all available money from the state, including the "professional services" allocation. Harris stood nodding in the back of Worthington's Town Hall. "I was taken aback that all the towns were asking for the professional services money," Harris said later. His report wasn't even a month old.