When I read recently that Bangor city councilors delayed a decision on creating a citywide Internet panel, I was a bit discouraged, to say the least. As a Bangor resident who formerly had a tech business (developing video games and digital animation) in downtown Bangor, I was disappointed to find that some council members seem reluctant to take the issue of high-speed Internet seriously. This seems seriously short-sighted.
The reason I moved my business away from downtown Bangor is because I couldn’t function with the available Internet speeds and connection breakdowns using local Internet providers. Some of my clients are NASA, Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, along with other universities and game companies worldwide. Without a dependable Internet connection, I was at times reduced to sending digital files to clients on thumb drives via FedEx.
Seriously? This is 2015 and I was resorting to file-transfer solutions that were common in the 1990s.
I’ve since moved my business to the Target Technology Incubator in Orono. Local planners are highly proactive in trying to acquire high-speed fiber for the area. At the incubator, I have enormously fast upload and download speeds, so I no longer have to wait all night to send a file to a client, then, at times, find the connection hung up in the middle of the transfer, forcing me to scramble to resend the files.
What fiber means for any community is anyone’s best guess. But unless we make this important investment — in our cities or statewide — we will continue to remain in the information dark ages. As an analogy, I use the railroads that opened the western United States to expansion in the late 1800s. No one really knew what to expect, but the results are indisputable. Today, by simply looking at any map, we see that this push was highly successful.
Maine is a rural state, and it’s losing a good proportion of its brightest students as they look elsewhere to find jobs that don’t exist locally. My growing business will, hopefully, expand and employ some of these students. If we’re successful, we hope our success will help to usher in similar businesses that work from the same local model and begin to grow this idea of a tech-based economy filled with a diverse set of technology-based startups. For that to be a reality in today’s world, they need to have ultra-fast connectivity — especially in a state like Maine and in a community such as Bangor.
A motto based on a quote from the movie “Field of Dreams,” “build it and they will come,” is more true today than at any time in the past. Unless we understand the benefits of building a fiber-optic infrastructure and how it could spread the idea of creating individual tech businesses, we will be locked in the same mindset that is currently seeing us bleed the talent and jobs we desperately need here in Maine to build a brighter future for everyone.
For this idea to flourish, we need a lot of pieces to come into play.
They start with ideas for businesses large and small as well as the development of more robust mentorship from community, university and business leaders so we can impart professional know-how and help to grow these ideas.
We have to continue to look at how fiber has helped other small communities and rural areas across the U.S. and build on those ideas. And for all of this to become reality, we need to have connectivity that works as fast as we think. This will open up doors to the rest of the world, making it easier to grow a successful business whose reach extends beyond our Bangor doorsteps and around the world.
Bangor needs to commit to high-speed Internet if it is truly to embrace the things that will grow our economy with higher-paying jobs that finally move us into the 21st century and beyond.
Chuck Carter of Bangor is founder and creative director for Orono-based Eagre Games.