Bar Harbor officially becomes a 'Gig Town'

BAR HARBOR — Officials gathered last Wednesday to cut the ribbon on an infrastructure project that has been some time in the making — and to celebrate the adoption of a potential new moniker for the municipality: “Gig Town.”

A “Gig Town” is what Fidium Fiber calls any community with broad access to their multi-gigabit fiber internet for residents and businesses. Bar Harbor becomes the 11th official “Gig Town” in Maine, according to Consolidated Communications.

“Over the past few years, we’ve definitely learned how important a strong internet infrastructure is to making sure that we all stay connected,” explained Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Director Everal Eaton as he kicked off the ribbon cutting ceremony. “And that’s for our families, for our businesses and for our community overall.”

The increased connectivity speed of fiber optic connections is something both Councilor Matthew Hochman and Simon Thorne, the senior manager of government affairs for Consolidated Communications, stressed during the ribbon cutting ceremony.

“Today, speed matters,” said Thorne, who explained that the network currently supports speeds up to 2 gigabits per second (gbps) for the more than 4,800 homes and businesses within its coverage area. Thorne also said that Fidium plans to ramp that up to 10 gbps in the near future.

To put that into context, your average high-definition movie file is generally around three gigabits in size. To download that file using the average 50 megabits per second (mbps) internet speed would take around eight minutes. To download that with 2gbps internet would take 12 seconds. With 10gbps internet speeds it would take 2.4 seconds.

For Hochman, the completion of this project represented the conclusion of a decade-long effort to upgrade internet connectivity in the area.

“Now that Fidium has partnered with us ... we have a very powerful broadband network that allows people to not just consume data, but to actually be creators and send their projects out into the world in a way that is quick and usable,” added Hochman.

“I first became involved in any municipal activity in Bar Harbor as a member of the Communications and Technology Task Force,” Hochman explained, referring to the group that was created in 2004 and morphed into the Communications and Technology Committee in 2019. “And one of the things that we pushed for was a town-wide broadband network.”

Hochman said that the task force first recommended that Bar Harbor build its own dark fiber, or private, network connecting every address in the municipality that the town could either run itself or lease to a third-party internet service provider. The cost of building such a network at the time, however, became prohibitive and the effort failed to gain any traction with the public.

“Realistically it would have been probably a $10 million project, so it was expensive,” Hochman said.

The town then shifted its focus to a network that would cover just municipal facilities, connecting the public works building in Hulls Cove to the Municipal Building downtown, and connecting all the town’s water monitoring systems to the public works building, and so on and so forth.

To that end, according to Hochman, Bar Harbor began leasing network space from Spectrum before an agreement capping the price of that lease ran out and the cost became about the same for Bar Harbor to build its own network just for town buildings — $750,000 was budgeted in 2020, but the project failed to attract any bids.

“There was ARPA money for other communities, so all of the companies who wanted to bid on it just didn’t have the time to get to us anymore, and it probably wouldn’t have been lucrative for them,” said Hochman, “so we started looking for a partner to come in and do our fiber network ... and when we put that out to bid, Consolidated [Communications] bid on the project, and part of their bid was they would accelerate their plans to bring Fidium to the area and that was a big one ... Fidium is now serving a lot of people who were unserved before and now they can get high speed in and out of their houses.”

Thorne also stressed the network’s reliability when it came to inclement weather that can damage wires or cause power outages.

“It’s not susceptible to weather, such as rain, frost, any of those events, it’s not susceptible. Even if a tree falls on it, it will still work. It truly needs to be severed or cut,” Thorne explained.

“And with the power outages and the storms that come and can last hours and sometimes days ... if you can generate power to your modem ... your network will come back up and sync automatically, and you’ll be back in it,” he continued. “And that’s the resiliency that people need. Especially if you’re working from home, if you’re utilizing a telemedicine device, you cannot go without it.”