FORT FAIRFIELD, Maine — One weekend morning in early June, Tim Goff saw a teenage boy sitting in front of the library with blankets.
“He’s been kicked out of his house,” Goff thought.
Then Goff, Fort Fairfield’s economic director, saw that the boy had soda, snacks and a laptop. He was playing video games using the library’s free and relatively fast Internet.
“There are people who have dial up here, still, in 2015,” Goff said. For a young family like his, the limited Internet options in Fort Fairfield and other Aroostook County towns can be “mindblowing.”
Some of the town’s approximately 3,500 residents will go to the library or sit in their cars after it closes to send emails, check Facebook or make online purchases.
“A lot of people come here just to hang out and have a good time Skyping people, Facebooking,” said Zach Turcotte, a recent Fort Fairfield High School graduate and who was using his smartphone on the library’s steps one day, along with three other teenage boys.
“Facebook is really how I get a hold of my parents. I’ll come here when I need a ride home, and I’ll message my mom,” Dustin Lee, who’s in high school, said. Lee is hoping to rebuild his grandfather’s 1987 Pontiac Firebird, and uses the Internet to learn about car repairs.
Inside, the library can get busy when a lot of people come in, doing everything from job searches to social media browsing, librarian Jennifer Gaenzle said.
The library has four computers for youth, three computers for adult use and three laptops. Its Internet connection is one of the fastest in Fort Fairfield.
“There are things that if have to download, I’ll come in on my own time and do them here on my Kindle, because mine is not the fastest,” Gaenzle, who lives on a farm about 3 miles from downtown, said. “We can’t watch Netflix and browse on the Internet at the same time. It’s usually one or the other.”
Others go to extraordinary lengths to get online, Goff said. One woman in a rural part of town often travels about 1.5 miles to her parent’s house down the road, takes their desktop computer’s hard drive back home, downloads their email and program updates, then takes it back. Another family subscribes to DISH satellite-broadcast Internet, which is limited in data use and expensive, and they have to budget their television and Web-browsing time.
One man who owns property on both sides of the Aroostook River set up a transmitter on the south side to extend the Internet signal to his home on the north side. And he’s still probably getting at best 10 megabits per second, or Mbps, the new baseline for high speed Internet used by the ConnectME Authority, according to Goff’s estimates. The Federal Communications Commission recently voted to raise the standard from 4 Mbps to 25.
The roughly two-thirds of Fort Fairfield residents who live in and around downtown actually can buy much the same Internet service as people across state, from either FairPoint or Time Warner. Likewise for businesses in that area.
But the rest of the residents living in the rural parts of town either are unserved or underserved by broadband Internet service, according to town’s estimates based on FCC standards. Through much of the town’s 78 square miles of farmland and forests, where there can be only a few homes every mile along a road, options are limited or very expensive for mediocre speed and access, such as using satellite.
A utility for businesses, people
Goff, a former television news host who grew up locally and recently moved back for the economic director position, has made it a priority to expand Internet access by pursuing public-private partnerships. He thinks the town’s future depends on it.
Some residents may not feel this is a problem. Twenty percent of Aroostook County residents are older than 65, and some people, regardless of their age, may not want Internet — though Goff argues they’ll be affected either way.
“Try to sell your house to someone who does want Internet or wants to work from home and start their own business,” Goff said. “That connectivity is important. That’s an expectation that younger folks have.”
A reasonable goal, given the current state of access, would be to have high speed Internet with 10 Mbps available at about $50 per month, Goff said.
Goff, his wife, who is a dental hygienist, and young daughter live in a fairly rural location, on a small hillside farm. They pay about $50 per month for high speed DSL, at up to 10 Mbps. It’s good enough that his daughter can still watch streaming kids shows without buffering.
Beyond families and individuals, reliable and fast Internet has become a “requirement” for small business owners and large companies looking for regions to locate new offices or operations, Goff argues.
One of Fort Fairfield’s newest businesses, the year-old Sisters Bakers & Coffee Shoppe, has its own Wi-Fi for its customers, including many Canadian travelers, but owner Heidi James said it could be more reliable. “There’s like a dead spot” on one side of the cafe, she said. “We always have to say, ‘You can’t sit in that spot.’”
“There’s no incentive” for a company like Time Warner or FairPoint to build out high-speed Internet for such a small number of customers across rural locations, Goff said. An Internet fiber optic system, which does run through the towns and corridors along Routes 1 and 11 in Aroostook, can cost $15,000 to $30,000 per mile.
“What would be the incentive? A subsidy or a grant,” he said. “I think some people cringe when they hear that, but that’s how most of the people in far-flung reaches of our country got power and got phone service, through the connectivity subsides of the utilities to build out those last miles.”
Goff thinks municipal broadband, being pursued in Rockport, has some benefits and risks but really depends on the location, taxbase and priorities of residents and businesses. It really would be difficult to finance in a town such as Fort Fairfield, he said.
The best opportunities would be to “seek out public-private partnerships” and pursue state and federal grants, as well as possible funding from the town.
Fort Fairfield is starting a survey of residents’ Internet status and desires to figure out where the most need and demand would be, should a private company be open to expansion, such as Fairpoint Communications. The company is planning to accept $80 million in federal funding to expand broadband with download speeds of at least 10 Mbps to areas where “market forces cannot support expansion,” which would include large swaths of The County and Fort Fairfield.
Fort Fairfield also is working on a project with Pioneer Broadband to extend service to more than 140 homes, some with fiber and some with an expanded version of DSL. The areas include the Route 167 corridor running northeast from Presque Isle to Fort Fairfield — one of the busiest traffic areas but still lacking in good Internet options — and the north side of town, along Route 1A and the Aroostook River.
“It is that proverbial next utility,” Goff said. “We have beautiful, stunning scenery and farmland, and this amazing community, but we’re already competitively at a disadvantage because you don’t have that connectivity.”