August 2019

Steve Campbell sent this note to the Lyme listserv…

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Friends, 

The LymeFiber project is moving right along, even if you don’t see our trucks on your road yet (but see below). Here is your August 2019 update. 

The big news is that all the “make-ready” agreements have been signed with the utilities who have wires on the town’s utility poles. Make-ready is the process of moving existing wires on the poles so there’s space for our fiber cables. Having all these agreements in place is a major milestone for any project like ours. You may see utility employees checking out the poles to see what they need to do. 

ValleyNet, the non-profit that built and operates ECFiber in Vermont and will build and operate LymeFiber, has issued a contract for the job of designing our network. This means figuring out exactly how the fiber cables will be strung through the town, where the hubs are, and where the branch points are. The final design is expected next month. 

So far we have more than 250 people who have completed our no-obligation signup form. That represents a substantial proportion of the premises in town and provides important data for the network design. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can still visit www.LymeFiber.net and add your home or business to the growing list. 

Finally, we are about to start the next important stage of the project: visiting each premise in town, whether they’ve signed up for service or not, to see how we would get the fiber cable from the utility pole on the road to the house or business (in the trade these are called “drops”). Is it a simple one-hop run from the pole to the building? Are there intermediate poles between the road and the building? Is there buried conduit? And so forth. Knowing all this means that if and when an installer comes by to connect the service, they’ll know exactly what they’ll be dealing with. The people doing this survey will have LymeFiber identification. Getting this information does not require going into the buildings, but it might mean walking around the yard. To make sure this is OK with the property owners, in the next few days we will be sending postcards to everyone in town announcing the survey and giving them the chance to opt-out if they don’t want the surveyors on their property. Look for those postcards soon. 

Thanks for supporting LymeFiber. As always, if you have questions or ideas to share, contact us at info@LymeFiber.net. 

Steve Campbell For LymeFiber