Committee

The Union Broadband Committee was chartered by the Select Board in October 2020, to advise the Board on how best to bring high-speed Internet services to the entire Town. At that time, high-speed service was available in one form or another to about 60 percent of the residents, mostly in the higher-density portions of the Town. But there were about 500 locations in the Town that had only slow DSL (digital subscriber line) service, provided over telephone lines.

The Committee worked with all service providers in Union, plus certain other municipal organizations, to identify the best path forward, and quickly settled on a fiber optic network as the principal target. In 2024, with Town support, Tidewater Telecom was awarded a federal grant to expand its initial fiber optic network to reach nearly 400 additional locations, most of them in relatively rural portions of the Town. That expansion has now been completed, with the result that well under a hundred addresses remain without wired access (fiber or cable) to high-speed service.

Recently, Spectrum announced its intention to upgrade its cable service statewide. And in the last few years, the radio technologies . . . satellite (e.g., Starlink) and cellular (T-Mobile and others) . . . have emerged as an effective high-speed alternative, especially for the remaining locations not reached by the wired services.

The Committee has been chaired since its inception by Adam Fuller, who has also served as the Committee’s Select board representative. Others who have served on the Committee include Renee Flanders, John Mountainland, Linda Mountainland, Holly Savage, Michael Ross, Kimberly Grindle, Christine Norris, and John Gibbons.

The Committee can be contacted at bbcunion24@gmail.com with questions or comments.