AGENDA
I. CALL TO ORDER – Emily Murphy Kaur, Committee Chair
II. Approval of Minutes from November 10, 2020
III. Conversation on Educational Experience for Vulnerable Populations During COVID
IV. Open Discussion on Title 9 Policies
We moved our web design business to Brattleboro in 2001. People around Brattleboro were mostly using modems, and Sovernet was just beginning to sign people up for (relatively slow) DSL connections. We limped by, overpaid, and designed local web sites for low bandwidth knowing most people were stuck at low speeds around here.
As time went on, things didn’t really speed up much here, but friends (and competitors) in bigger cities were leaping ahead. While we were lucky to get 3-7 Mbps here, they were enjoying 200 Mbps or more.
If you want to learn how Vermont is going to have 100Mbps broadband available to most residents by 2020 (or actually why it very probably will not), which was the goal of Vermont’s 10 year Telecommunications Plan in 2014, watch this video. The second speaker, starting at around 50
minutes in, is particularly interesting and he provides a lot of researched results on the failings of the previous “plan” (which seems to have basically been a legal requirement to develop a plan, which was ignored due to a lack of legal enforcement and funding):
Brattleboro could do much better with technology, and as a result do better as a Town. There are some obstacles in the way, though:
Poor Internet Choices
Brattleboro choices for Internet are rather poor. Hardly anyone here gets 25 megabits down and 3 megabits up, a standard definition of broadband. To approach those speeds one must pay a small monthly fortune.
