By JEFF EPSTEIN
[email protected]
BROWNSVILLE, Vt. — Getting on the internet from home or office usually involves a subscription to a commercial service, one that may also supply cable television or voice service. Hitting a working WiFi hotspot is often a different matter, however. Given the hilly terrain in parts of the river valley, mobile connectivity can be weak or unavailable.
People in West Windsor, however, can now take advantage of an important and convenient combination: the municipally owned ECFiber utility, and a new “internet café” service rolled out Friday at the Brownsville Butcher and Pantry on Route 44.
ECFiber, formally known as the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District, is a fiber optic network owned by 24 towns including West Windsor. It was formed 2016 from the transformation of an earlier 24-town contract between municipalities that West Windsor originally approved in the 2008, ECFiber chair Irv Thomae said.
The town of Windsor is not included. It apparently opted out of the original 2008 inter-town agreement, and “they didn’t pursue it … we don’t know why,” he said.
Windsor is currently served by regional and national telecom companies, and since 2014 has offered a public WiFi hotspot in the downtown area, created by a partnership of the town, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority and the Vermont Digital Economy Project.
ECFiber is a non-profit organization still owned by its 24 member towns, and is required by the state to be independently funded. Local taxpayer funds cannot be used to subsidize ECFiber operations. The fiber network has been built out over the last two years, and only now has West Windsor nearly completed construction.
It still is selling consumer subscriptions, however, and has plenty of capacity for growth, company officials said.
The town hall and other municipal buildings were connected at no additional costs as part of the buildout, and a WiFi connection to the internet is available at town hall and at the Mary Blood Library across the road, but until the Brownsville Butcher & Pantry opened store opened in November of last year, no commercial space for people to get on the net existed.
The Brownsville store, at the site of the former general store, originally included a WiFi hotspot from their own ECFiber service. Through the store’s business association (Friends of the General Store) owners Lauren Stevens and Peter Varkonyi found people associated with ECFiber, which had already established internet café service in south Woodstock, Royalton, and a couple of other areas.
Setting up a separate high-speed internet connection (the internet café part) in Brownsville Butcher & Pantry just made sense to everyone, said Varkonyi.
During a celebratory introduction at the store Friday, Thomae and Carole Monroe of Valley Net, ECFiber’s partner and contractor, explained to customers what the internet café concept was all about, emphasizing that no taxpayer funds are involved in providng the service.
The maximum speed of the dedicated connection is 700 Mbps (700 million bits per second), but that is shared among all users on the connection. The Eagle Times found a speed of 200 Mbps on its laptop during the event. Such connections in cafes and coffee shops are often 100 Mbps or less.
Because the store is a popular community meeting place, it is already an internet hangout.
“People come from all over town to do what they can’t do from home,” Monroe said.
Of course, the courtesy of synergy usually involves partaking of each partner’s services, so many folks at the Friday event had lunch while they were there. At the conclusion of his remarks to the crowd, Thomae thanked Stevens and Varkonyi for both electronic and gastronomic connections.
“I had an excellent lunch,” he said.
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