At 15, ECFiber Focuses on Reliability

By Staff | on May 02, 2023

Network engineer Corey Klinck peers through a cabinet filled with fiber-optic cables, one of several such cabinets in each of ECFiber’s member towns, that coordinate the transmission of internet traffic. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

In 2008, the upstart, municipal owned broadband internet access provider ECFiber was still getting its financial bearings.

The organization came to life with the goal of getting high-speed internet access to every home possible in the area, but funding for the ambitious project always seemed just around the corner. One has but to peruse the online archive of Herald coverage to see how, time after time, money failed to materialize even as communities grew increasingly enthusiastic about bringing internet access to the most rural parts of the region.

Fast forward to the present—15 years later—and the organization is in a very different place.

With 7,700 customers hooked up in East-Central Vermont (that’s what the EC in ECFiber stands for), the days of questioning whether the project would amount to anything has pretty much been answered.

In an interview at the end of February, Tom Cecere, the CEO of GWI Vermont, which operates ECFiber, spoke about the state of broadband in rural Vermont, road blocks hit over the years, and what the future holds for the community owned internet service provider— challenges that look much different from those it saw as a fledgling concept.

ECFiber made a big institutional switch-over earlier this year. From the beginning, the group was formed with ownership from member towns, but the operations were done by a nonprofit called ValleyNet. That’s where all of the employees who kept the network running got their paychecks.

Over the years, the system expanded and in February, ValleyNet passed on the ECFiber baton to Maine-based Great Works Internet, which formed GWI-Vermont. All of the staff that had been running ECFiber service transitioned over to GWI and that’s a change that Cecere said will be to the organization’s benefit.

“They got into fiber through enterprises and larger businesses,” Cecere said of GWI, a point, he hopes will help ECFiber better serve the growing number of businesses in the region that need specialized internet services not typically provided by residential carriers.

Along with ECFiber, GWI-Vermont is also responsible for LymeFiber and DVFiber in New Hampshire.

Cecere became CEO of ValleyNet in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when “ValleyNet was having what I’d characterize as ‘growth operational challenges.’”

The demands on the organization, he said, exploded during the pandemic as more and more people began working from home and relying heavily on video conferencing services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

With those growing demands and the discovery of mismanagement of finances on the part of a contractor, “it started to make more and more sense as we got into the summer and fall to transfer the operational responsibility.” The association with GWI, Cecere added, gives ECFiber additional capabilities in problem solving and a larger organization to lean on. “It’s all the same people, except we have easy access to some of that expertise” that GWI has built up via its fiber systems for enterprises and emergency responders.

That means that at 15 years old, ECFiber is at a point where it’s getting past just building a network and can begin tackling more longterm reliability goals.

Hiccups

ECFiber’s decade-and-a-half history isn’t without its share of hiccups and two major ones came in the past two years.

In 2021, Amber and Scott Hoyt reported that some of their dairy cows had been dying from something called “hardware disease.” The ailment isn’t really a disease, but the result of cows ingesting metal that cuts up their digestive tract and is prone to infection. Over the course of time, the Hoyts traced the source of the metal to stainless steel lashing cables that had been abandoned in a hayfield during the installation of fiber optic cable on ECFiber’s behalf.

The Hoyts believe that lashing material was hidden in the grass and got mixed in with their cows’ feed when hay was cut from the field.

Neither ECFiber nor ValleyNet had done the work; they’d contracted it out to Eustis Cable Enterprises and another subcontractor— Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis—for Eustis had been at that location.

The Hoyts brought a lawsuit alleging negligence, but later dropped ECFiber and ValleyNet from the suit. According to the judiciary’s database, the suit is still pending against Eustis and Fiber Genesis.

As hairy as that situation was for ECFiber, another incident struck closer to home.

“When I came in, I was fairly unhappy, it’s safe to say, with the state of the financial systems—but it was massively understaffed,” Cecere said.

With one part-time contractor responsible for the ValleyNet books, he hired on Cliff Rankin as full-time CFO and quickly an embezzlement scheme spanning years was discovered.

The culprit, John Van Vught, skipped town. In January, a judge awarded ValleyNet $2 million in damages, though with Van Vught on the lam, that money has yet to materialize.

“We wound up having to redo the books for close to 11 years,” Cecere said. “So that was painful. Nobody suspected anything.”

Even before Cecere arrived, he said, ValleyNet understood that increasing the operational staff would be an important next step.

“I’m happy to say that finance was one of the areas that I identified and we filled it with a great person and so we stopped the bleeding.”

Looking Forward

The goals of the ECFiber of today are also different from those of its fledgling self.

Rather than expanding, Cecere said, the organization is at a stabilization point where introducing resiliency to the network is paramount.

In late winter and into spring, ECFiber and GWI were working on some of the last new construction in the short term.

Cecere said that ECFiber had spent most of its early years “just trying to get to you”—building out the network as quickly as possible to serve as many people as possible.

“Our uptime,” he added, “is actually quite good compared to the industry, and especially considering the rural nature of our network, but it’s not where we need it to be going forward.”

That’s going to be the organization’s next big challenge and one that’s already underway.

“There are simple-in-concept, but expensive things we can do,” he said, to increase resiliency. One such thing would be to create fiber runs to each town from multiple directions. That would allow for a sort of “backup internet” in the case that one incoming line were damaged.

“That’s the kind of thing you don’t build when you’re saying ‘well, I could do that or I could get to Thetford.’ Instead you get to Thetford, right? That’s the kind of the thing that just costs money; it’s not theoretically hard.”