There is a one-time activation fee on all accounts.
Your town’s MLP may choose to add a monthly MLP fee to help defray depreciation reserve requirements and debt service for the money borrowed to build the network.
Getting Connected
When you sign up for service, your town’s MLP will bring a fiber connection from the network at the road to your house. The cost of this “drop” to your home will depend on how far you are from the road and whether you have overhead or underground utility service. The cost to you for this drop will depend on the available construction funds that your MLP has to work with.
Click on your town to sign up now:
Becket | Heath | New Salem | Rowe | Washington | Windsor
Questions? See the FAQ page for your town:
Becket | Heath | New Salem | Rowe | Washington | Windsor
Working Together
The towns of Becket, New Salem, Rowe, Washington and Windsor are charter member of WiredWest, a municipal co-op formed to bring broadband to towns in Western Massachusetts. WiredWest will be your towns Internet Service Provider and has contracted with Whip City Fiber to operate the network and serve our customers.
Why are the towns of Becket, New Salem, Rowe, Washington, and Windsor working with WiredWest?
By serving its member towns on a regional basis, WiredWest will reduce the administrative burden, cost and risks of owning and operating a fiber network. Customers will pay WiredWest for services, and as a non-profit cooperative, it will return excess revenues to its member towns.
What does Whip City Fiber do? Whip City Fiber is an internet service provider owned and operated by Westfield Gas + Electric. It has a successful track record serving customers in the city of Westfield and is working with several towns in Western Massachusetts to launch broadband service over municipal fiber networks. As a subcontractor to WiredWest, Whip City Fiber will operate and maintain our network and deliver service to our customers.
Towns pleased with changes to state broadband funding
Reprinted from The Recorder
By DIANE BRONCACCIO , Recorder Staff
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Local officials say they hope the state’s revised broadband policy will break the gridlock on which the internet build-out for unserved towns has stalled over the last two years.
“This new grant program is a huge step forward for last-mile broadband,” said Bob Handsaker, co-chair of the Charlemont Broadband Committee. “It ensures that all of the currently allocated state funds are fully available to towns that want to build their own fiber-to-the-home networks. More importantly, each town can control how those funds are used, allowing the town to select their own partners, minimize risk and make the state funding stretch as far as possible,” said Handsaker.
The state designated $40 million for 41 towns with no access to high-speed internet service — a sum that would cover about a third of the costs of bringing broadband to homes and businesses in those towns. Roughly half of each town’s grant money was to be spent on construction, while the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) was to use the remaining allocation to design and engineer the network. Towns that wanted to build networks without engineering and design assistance from MBI would have been eligible only for the “construction” portion of the grant. But the change in the grant process, through the state Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development (EOHED), will allow towns to apply and receive their full allocation of the $40 million grant. Franklin County’s “unserved” towns eligible for part of this state grant money include: Ashfield, Charlemont, Colrain, Hawley, Heath, Leyden, Monroe, New Salem, Rowe, Shutesbury, Warwick and Wendell.
“The streamlined grant program … […]
Back regional broadband, towns tell MBI panel
By Larry Parnass, Reprinted from The Berkshire Eagle
WORTHINGTON — Broadband advocates from Berkshire County and beyond pressed Thursday for the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to free up funding, speed decision-making and support regional solutions to a problem they say impairs civic life.
Their sometimes sharply worded remarks took frequent aim at the MBI itself, saying the agency assigned the job of bringing broadband to dozens of unserved communities has too often changed its rules, frustrating dogged local efforts to end the digital dark ages.
“We’ve endured a constant state of flux,” said Howard Bronstein of Plainfield.
Peter Larkin, the MBI board chairman and former Pittsfield lawmaker, joined the institute’s deputy director, Edmund Donnelly, and field representative Bill Ennen at a head table.
For nearly two hours, they heard a litany of distress.
Among the toughest appraisals of the institute’s performance came from David Kulp of Ashfield, who leads that Franklin County town’s broadband committee.
“After nine years, it’s time that MBI acknowledge its failure, drops its paternalistic approach and simply grant money to the towns to get the job done,” Kulp said. “Let’s call a spade a spade.”
Other speakers echoed Kulp’s call for the agency to release to towns the millions of dollars categorized as “professional services” funding — and let towns apply that design and engineering money directly to the networks they seek to build.
“We welcome the criticism because it’s the only way it gets better,” Larkin told The Eagle after the meeting.
He said the institute and its board are reconsidering how to use money allocated for professional services. They will decide whether towns will get access to that funding directly, or receive the value only in […]
WiredWest Offers New Proposal For Western Mass. Broadband
By JIM LEVULIS, WAMC – Original post on WAMC.org
Efforts to bring broadband internet to underserved areas of rural, western Massachusetts have been ongoing for more than a decade. Now the regional cooperative WiredWest has a new proposal. It comes after Governor Charlie Baker’s administration shook up and reviewed the efforts of the Massachusetts Broadband Institute.
WAMC spoke with Bob Labrie, a member of WiredWest’s executive committee, and Tim Newman, the group’s spokesman. Newman says the proposal calls for WiredWest to administer the regional internet network with private providers handling the operations.
The Massachusetts Broadband Institute did not respond to a request for comment on the plan.
WiredWest offers broadband operations
by Larry Parnass – The Berkshire Eagle Read full story
NORTHAMPTON — Rather than build and run a sprawling regional broadband system, a nonprofit cooperative now seeks to fill a narrower but critical role for towns fighting to obtain fast internet connections.
WiredWest leaders made this case Saturday to municipal officials from across Western Massachusetts: Build your networks and let us take care of the rest.
“It’s going to save our town a lot of money in resources,” said Gayle Huntress of Shutesbury, a WiredWest leader who led the more than two-hour presentation at Northampton’s middle school. “We’re focused on solving this part”. Since everyone wants to save money, still they could get some great financial advice here and be able to have more resources later. If you’re planning to apply for a loan but you don’t have a house or car, forbrukslån loans are the best for you.
Thirteen months ago, the nonprofit was poised to begin steps to construct broadband networks for dozens of member towns still in the digital dark ages.
But the state halted that effort, citing problems in the business model.
On Saturday, about 75 officials gathered to hear the group’s revised pitch. It now offers to handle only the operations end of broadband service, after towns work on their own with the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to construct systems.
Unlike a year ago, the field of interested towns has narrowed, following MBI’s shift to emphasize service through private companies, with taxpayer money for town-by-town network construction awarded to those firms.
Towns that go that route […]
The Berkman Case Study of WiredWest
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University is a public policy institute whose mission is to explore and understand cyberspace. Read the Center’s just-released long-researched case study on WiredWest.
WiredWest: a Cooperative of Municipalities Forms to Build a Fiber Optic Network. Western Massachusetts Towns Create a New Model for Last-Mile Connectivity, but a State Agency Delays Approval and Funding plus link to the study