Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: We're live. Alright. Welcome everybody to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. We are here today with the Department of Public Service to learn about their connectivity division annual report. So we'll go around the room and introduce ourselves and then turn it over to you. So I'm representative Kathleen James from the Bennington Ford District.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Scott Campbell from Saint John Gray.

[Rep. Richard Bailey (Member)]: Richard Bailey, Lamoille too. Chris Morrow, Windham. Windsor Bennington. Michael Southworth, Philadelphia too.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: Good for Howland, Rutland 4.

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Dara Torre, Washington two.

[Rep. Bram Kleppner (Member)]: Bram Kleppner, 13. First, I wanna to.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Who do we have

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: in the room?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Dana Wade Perry, Raskers.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. Alrighty. Hunter, for the record, over to you.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Under Attention, director of public service department. Thank you for inviting me in. It's my understanding I'm here to testify on the highlights summary and recommendations of the telecom annual report.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: That is correct. And we, I believe, have your annual report here.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. Yep. And thank you, Alex. It's touching that up. Appreciate it. No. Thank you. So I'll start with the It was needs a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: up there.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Oh. We might need to. Hey, Alex. Do we need to be concerned that there's no picture of us up there?

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: One second.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You want me to redo this thing?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: You don't wanna do that?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I think you just press it down. Okay. Press it up.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. I guess.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And then the blood factor. I know.

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Yes. I know.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Okay. It's sensitive.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Right. It didn't say much. There we go. Now, Tom.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I recently.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Where can I teach?

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: Oh, now it's like

[Unidentified Committee Member]: There we go.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. That's cool.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Button is scrolling through the images.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: The different view? There we go.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It's still about now standard here.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's you got rich, though. Yeah. Like, in the front of you. So

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Oh, interesting. Oh, look.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It it goes around and all of those who are speaking.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: For whoever's speaking.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Screen. I don't think it's really good view, but I'm

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: about to press mode. We're usually pressing mode.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Mhmm. Yeah. That's working. There we go.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Alright.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. Back at it. Hunter, sorry about that.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: I'm a legislator. It takes

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: a bit of cancer. Is again Hunter Thompson, director of telecommunications for the public service department. So I'll start off with a summary of the division, the telephone division, and public service. There is three and a half of us total. It's currently two and a half. We have one position that we are recruiting for. That includes myself, the telecom director, my telecom project manager, who does most of the two forty eight day reviews, as well as the commercial mobile review service petitions and run the runs of projects at the department, like the drive tests. The connectivity coordinator who does outreach, it would have been the one who would make a nice PowerPoint for this testimony. Currently recruiting, looking to make an offer and get that position back on board. And our telecom infrastructure specialist, which is the half, they are part time person. They turn the data and collect into consumables like the mobile drive test map, the broadband map, triple A power map. And they currently, as of last year, handled the mobile, rather handled the broadband maximum speed map mentality. So one of the things that we do within the division is we handle the BUSF, the Vermont Universal Service Fund. Telecom Division Manned Business provides funding for the Vermont Telecommunications Relay Service and associated equipment distribution program. We also provide administrative services for the Vermont Telecommunication Relay Service Advisory Council. Or VTRS, it's easier to abbreviate this service over and over. The VTRS program provides functionality equivalent telephone service to Vermonters and Vermont's DeafBlind and Hard of Hearing community systems. Since 07/01/2026, the USF Universal Service Fund has been funded via the new mechanism passed in Act 145 in 2024. This changes change was a switch to a per line charge for voice over IP and postpaid wireless, as well as traditional landline service. It was projected to result in the ability to fully fund 09/11, fully fund September, and to have a little leftover for the Universal Service Fund to build the nest eggs. As some of the filers who contribute to this fund are quarterly and some are biannually, We have so far only seen two cycles of funding and we're unsure if the change will have the desired impact. We'll have a full review into the performance of the fund at the end of this fiscal year. The next big thing we do within the division is two forty eight eight petitions. The numbers, we did a 174 last year. It might be slightly different than the PUC depending on when we fold the numbers before or after a certain date if they if more or less covered at that point. I know some percents have been tossed around, at least as far as the things that we did. When I point the numbers, they were 85% de minimis, 4% limited size in schools, and 11% of all new towers. For reference, in 2024, we did 82 to 48 petitions. Of those, 70% were diminimus, 18% were limited size and scope, and the same 11% were full.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Hunter, can you remind me of the, sorry, we've taken so much testimony. Can you remind me of the role the department plays in the 248A process? When you say we did.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: The department does more than the telecom division. It also works with the public advocacy division, which does a legal back and forth with the PUC in that process. But as far as telecom goes, we review every one of these petitions that comes to the PUC. That's right. It gets sent to us. We agree that we go through the technical specs. We go through the site plans. Let's see. We validate provider numbers. For instance, we have an internal spreadsheet where we calculate the visible area of the antennas versus what they say versus what their site plan says and make sure everything matches up. Sometimes we find discrepancies. For instance, we had a plan that showed four antennas on the site plan. The narrative showed three, so we reach back out to the tower builder and we say, Hey, something doesn't happen. Say, You're going to do four antennas here. Say you're going do three here. Can you provide some clarity? In case, actually, we have a structural report. Each one of these tower modifications comes with a structural report of an engineer that says whether or not it's going to pass. 99.9% of them passed. We had one that actually said it was going fail, we had two that said it was going fail. So we reached back out and said, you guys submitted a plan for some modifications that don't pass the structural report. What's going on? They got back to us and said, You're right. We forgot to submit the changes that we were going to do to the tower, so it does pass, as well as the amended structural report, so they submit those. We do a technical review of every employee and the petition that comes in and calculate disturbed surface area based on the site plans. If it says it's going to be 100 feet by 100 feet, we do the math and say, Okay, it matches up to what the narrative says. That's the type of proof that you can use for the 2.3 petitions.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: And that's delivered to the PUC as part of its body of evidence.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: We also look at propagation maps and existing tower locations and compare those for colocation reports in our tower database where appropriate we make know of potential colocation sites and ask for more clarification on why they may or may not be sooner rather. If someone suggests a tower within 10 feet of another tower, we'll say, Hey, we have a record that you already have a tower here and what's going on? Why can't you colocate? 10 feet is a widely inaccurate number, but we oftentimes ask why the co location is not possible. Yeah, the piece I have in here is I just want to make sure folks know that this isn't a rubber stamped process. We have to leave each of them with one of the Essex and the telecom project manager and myself go through all of these to make sure they are what they say they are.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Your

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: technical review process that you pass on to the PUC is separate, different group that does the advocacy in front of the PUC for the public interest? I believe that is a public advocacy group. Have we do the technical review. We give our results to the public advocacy group, and that helps drive their stance. Thank you. So one thing that's worth mentioning is that we often hear from citizens who want increased cell service. They're a patient. I know that's probably not something you guys necessarily hear. The committee, but we get calls from citizens and municipalities who are asking how we can assist in getting service in their town. I'll give another example in a minute further down. But this fall, we received a number of calls from Shelburne regarding Verizon service, spotty Verizon service on Loop 7. We investigated. We looked at the tower map to see where the towers were. We reached out to Verizon to come to Network Engineering, and we said, Is there anything wobbly going on in that direction? Is something we need to change? Can you confirm all your towers are working? We confirmed it. We further went through and got back onto this town of Shelburne and said, This is this is where the infrastructure is. This is how far it propagates and really if you're looking to expand access along that corridor, if you break the town of Route 7, you're going to need larger macro structure or similar infrastructure to support that. So we will look at that and some work with folks when that stuff comes up.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Just a reminder that we did ask the and the accurate update is mapping. I don't think Steve's asked yet. Did we get those?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Gotcha. Yeah.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: Did they confirm that they would provide that to us? Because I think they consider that competitive

[Unidentified Committee Member]: observation. It's it's I consider it an affirmation.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: Coverage area or the towers?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No. No. The coverage area. But Yeah. We don't gotta get enough of it. Okay. I do have second question.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It seems like a bunch of the towers that have been tested for for cell service. They were the two way two way radios. Can you remind me who utilizes that service?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Those are business to business services. So they're used by I don't have specific examples for that provider, but that type of service in general is used for maybe delivery companies, construction companies back and forth, the buses. I believe that the transit system uses push to talk two way radio service as opposed to cellular mobile service as well as the public safety network, but that resides on a different that's a different thing, but that's another example of a push to talk business to business service. But that's not That's not. That wasn't with the contested towers. So

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: the I wanna just make sure I'm understanding. That was an important question. Think so. The two of the contested towers we've been hearing about recently in Tinmouth and Willoughby, I think, the two they they were two way radio towers, but that is that is not a public safety use. That could be UPS wanting to have a relay for its drivers.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: It's my understanding that the service that that company offers is business to business service and not a public safety service.

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Yeah. Right. Right. So that that you mean, like, ITW? Yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But I believe we hear testimony that that by definition, those are considered in the public good.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Oh, there. Yep. Statute currently considers radio service in the public good.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's in the statute.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Henry?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Another petition that's currently still with the PUC, I can't get into specific details, while there's pushback on the tower is being proposed in a location where there's currently zero cell service. There's nothing. It's a complete dense one. It's along a major traffic corridor for commuting. And according to the town's Facebook page and front porch foreign discussions with the UN. And looked at during the petition, our review, there's a large amount of support for it. So while I agree, a lot of the pushback and more vocal pushback is not in support of the towers, at least through empirical evidence and investigation. And we've looked at, like I said, the Facebook page for the town and adjoining town and then the town's front port forum. The discussion back, of course, is directly in support of the cell towers. Which tower is this? I'm sorry. This is one that is still in flight, the PC. So we need to get into area. Yeah. That's why they didn't see that. They're intentionally vague. This is just to provide the other side of the coin that many people want coverage where they live. I don't have coverage where I live. I live ten minutes outside of town. I would love to have some coverage at my house. Last time we had a bad storm, that I lost power, and I was not able to use my cell phone through my internet connection. I had to drive all out down the road to book a hotel, so I had to stay in a place I had to use at night. But there's another side to this point, and people do want to see expanded coverage across a lot of the state. So, for the statutory stuff we do, we have a responsibility for mapping broadband availability across the state. Our map is a little less useful than others. A fair amount of our data is found by confidentiality agreements. So, while we show the maximum speed at every nine eleven address we map, we don't show the provider provides that speed and service. That's due to the fact that in order to get this data, have to sign an agreement that says more sharing. The results are reported on the department website as well as in the department's handover APIs and used by PDM to identify competitive municipalities within the noted in the incentive rate plan. So that data is directed to use Mypidium to figure out which municipalities have over 95% penetration for a Pfizer. This project is a fair amount of work. We are increasingly getting less responses to our health rate and the data we get back is increasingly less useful. Year, our total response rate was slightly under fifty percent. Only forty two percent of the people that we asked for data actually responded. So even though that number was low, it does skew because the responses we did get represented 82% of the total rate that we received. So that means that in that case, 18% of the data on this year's map was carried forward from last year because no one responded when they reached out. There is a cable company in Northfield that I think is currently in the process of being bought out by Charter. So, we get instances like that where we reach out and say, Can you send us your rooftops? Can you send us where you are of service? Then we are crickets. As General Foss says, you can reach out three times over the course of about a month and a half to two months, and that's three times. And after three times, we can fall back to the last quiet one they gave us. Another issue with this is the format that we get the data is becoming increasingly less useful. For instance, some of the larger cable companies used to send us actual cable routes or address lists, and now we're just getting the federal fabric IDs. The federal broadband map Just getting what I have. A federal fabric ID. The federal broadband map offers a very similar product as to the one we do, and each location on that includes a fabric ID. We're getting some of the larger companies just sending us this federal fabric ID, which we then need to go in and reverse engineer into the actual address to put on our map. Our data person works with both the VCBB and the vendor of the VCBB uses a federal broadband, not what we do. But it's still a fair amount of work for that to happen. All that said, the state has made huge strides in fiber deployment. This is in the annual report. In 2024, we barely grow to 50% mark for homes with fiberglasses. In 2025, we are at 72.6%. Oh. That's a big jump. So that's the summary. I'll move into the more fun stuff with just some highlights. At least two of them. Two of the larger highlights are the completing of the updated 2.8 power map and the twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five mobile drive test project. So for the two forty eight a map, I think someone had mentioned it in testimony last week. We redid the two forty eight a map and made it current as to about six months ago or so. Again, the vacant position, one of their roles is to take all that data from PUC documents and put it in the map. So we still have what we have to do. This map allows people to see all the 248 a approved towers in the state, as well as provide direct links into the three two c system to let people see the petitions that are attached to the tower Position which kept this map more up to date was vacant, and while we started the process of adding the missing data, we are on the behind. We've also engaged with PAC250, Peter Viel, to be specific, and are beginning the conversations with them and with BCGI to find a method other than just a preformed text search in the HAC two fifty database to hold their tower information so then we can incorporate it into this map. Once we have been able to do that successfully, we'll probably rename the 248 Tower map to the general Vermont Telecommunication Tower map as it will represent hopefully everything within the state. The other highlight is the mobile drive test. We've talked about that a couple of times. This is my favorite project. This is I worked with previous public service employee, Corey Chase, when I was with the NDS, and this project is part of what made me apply for this job three years. So the department completed the driving portion and the mapping portion of the twenty twenty four-twenty twenty five Mobile Drive Test. We completely revamped the public map, make it consumable on a mobile phone, on a tablet, on a computer. We revamped the legend. So rather than showing decibels gain or anything like that, we make it more useful to the general public with basically good, better, best, none good, better, best, so that people can take a look. We collected test results for over 7,000 miles in a row across the state. Drove a lot more than that because it takes a while. We have to drive the same route to get to Burlington and to get to Seattle. Over 7,000 miles on road were tested. We did some analysis of this, and this kind of goes to what we were talking about in 248A, is that since 2022 to 2024, 2025, we only saw an improvement in, I guess past tests would be a way to put it, of about 7.5%. So each one of these tests represents a hex, and the hex is roughly a kilometer across. So only about 7.5% of those were able to make a call that weren't in 2022. But on the flip side, 77% of those had greater data speeds. So this goes back to the de minimis mutations you're seeing in 248A, where the bulk of the work that's being done by the cellular companies is in equipment upgrades to get faster speeds as opposed to deployments. The drive test mill will on service. Point 5% increase in additional cell service and a 77% increase in speeds of existing cell service. Thing we know is there's an increase in overall coverage that we're seeing more of an increase in speeds. The other thing we do that I really enjoy is public engagement outreach and advocacy. We've participated in two conferences this year. The first was the twenty twenty five Emergency Preparedness Conference in September in Killington. The department presented an interactive display of the twenty twenty four-twenty twenty five drive test results. The presentation on the data collection is not a methodology and a general pitch on the importance for citizens and emergency response personnel to have a good understanding of the reach of the cellular network as they respond to emergencies. The second conference we participated in was we were invited to be a presenter at the Northeast Parking User's Conference in Faunus Maps. That's the Essex conference that's left mapping folks together and talk about cryptography and mapping. The department was a presenter, large regional conference with about 400 attendees and 50 people at the presentation of the program Dave. It focused on the normal drive test. Again, the history of methodology, the auxiliary tools that we use for our drive route mapping, the test results aggregation and presentation, and then the lessons learned on how we did that project. Two other things that we did was we worked closely with the town of St. Albans to try to get small cell infrastructure to cover St. Albans Bay. Our push was fairly successful, just to be blunt. We reached out for our contacts. We engaged a local Vermont company that owns all of this piece of spectrum to do the work of those conversations. Eventually, Windham offered no positive outcome. We engaged one of the big three telecom providers who provided what I considered, we don't want to do the work post. We don't have someone to give you a quote on your house that is, we don't really want to do this, cool. That's kind what I thought that one was. We're still loosely engaged with them, but there hasn't been an update in a while. One positive outcome of this was one night when I was speaking at the St. Louis Town Select Board just to say that we were waiting for a quote. A lawyer from one of the other big three companies was there. I contacted him after and recommended an additional antenna to cover the bay, used our drive test map and our 248A map to show what we were talking about. It's my understanding that they are adding or added that antenna so that St. Augustine now has come from at least one of the big three sided with the virus. So even though the outreach that we did initially didn't resolve what we were hoping for, we were able to use our contacts and our data sets to point out the issue and hopefully get it resolved. The next one is called Spinach and Life Alert, but that's just because the person has spinach in their emails. So they're watching. We had a citizen reach out to us for assistance and information on how telecommunications could assist her mother with sieging in place. So this is an issue for all of us. We discussed the different medically connected devices, which is things like fall detection. We discussed battery backup options or power outages, redundancy of systems, including having something that works with a wired system as well as something that works with a cellular system. And eventually, we were probably within 20 miles of our house from near Duke of our drive to streets. We drove over there. We stopped. We met her. We talked to her and did testing on her back porch, in her kitchen, and in a driveway just to get measurements and tell her, offer some evidence based data of exactly what provider had the strongest signal in her location. I spoke to her on her behalf a few times to get details about the services they offered, which is why I asked her when I here. I think I mentioned that I know Life Alert does indeed work with white phones. I spent more than a few hours on the phone with Life Alert, called me through their options. Believe ultimately her mother decided to move to assisted living, but we did everything we could to ensure that she was aware of the telecom options that were available to her and all the doctors that they do want to be in the interface. That's one of my favorite things. I really enjoyed the advocacy piece. I enjoy working with people and trying to help. Yeah, I'll also sleep at night with. So finally, some recommendations. This will ask you to ask. I'm happy to answer any other questions about this. I did talk about this and mystery it because some of it's fairly dry and you guys can read it on the other. So the first and most important recommendation is please change the cadence of the twenty year telecom plan from three years to five years. So currently the ten year telecom plan is redone every three years, even though it's a ten year plan. I'll note that in testimony the other day, the to the plan was over a million dollars. That is not correct. We spent about $150,000 on the last plan. That's still a sizable amount. It was not a million dollars. The reasoning for a longer cadence on the plan is that the fiber to the premises deployments are currently well underway. We're making a lot of progress as we've seen with the 50 to 73%. And the deployment timeline is longer than the three year cadence of the plan. This leaves the plan to focus on wireless telecommunications, and the last plan at least, infrastructure resilience. The last time we did commissioned an engineering study which went to the recommendation of smaller infrastructure across the state to government themselves. And the truth is that changes in wireless technology are currently evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary. Currently, we're live five gs on our cell phones, six gs is years away. The spec is still being discussed. They haven't decided exactly what six gs is going look like. And the direct cell, the satellite is currently still mostly in advertising. Don't if you can see that. I did testing of that. I drive about ten minutes from my house, there's a spot that has no anything or cell service. So during Christmas week, drove off there and I did some testing of nine eleven. Like I said, it took about ten minutes from one of my locations to get enough of a satellite signal to test and to text 911 to say, hey, this is Hunter. I'm testing emergency. So that it might be useful, but it's not something I've currently bet my life on. As far as the result is, he is Green Mountain Power is doing large scale resilience projects to bury power and communication infrastructure. But again, the timeline for these projects is longer than a three year cadence. So we haven't seen the wider scale impacts that this work will have. So

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Hunter, I wanna just make sure I understand. So you guys are recommending or requesting that we change the cadence of the ten year telecom plan from every three years to every five years. So it gets updated every five years looking at 10. And if I'm boiling down everything you're saying, you're saying it's because the technology is changing at this point on a longer timeline, and so there aren't enough changes every three years to merit the expense and the time? I'm just trying to boil it all down.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: That's perfect. That's exactly it. The cadence of the technology changes is now longer than three years. So, we're putting forth suggestions and ideas in the ten year plan, but those suggestions and ideas will take more than three years to have a difference or to notice a difference. So

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So you're returning to look at impacts too soon in your Yes. Okay.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. That's exactly

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Well, yeah.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: I would just note personally that I think there are a lot

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: of changes that need to

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: be made to statute, but to to the government. So opening it up just for delaying how often it's produced feels like a waste of opportunity. And I'm not sure that the chair has enough time for life necessary

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: visions to that. The second recommendation is, please suspend the TCAT, the telecommunications advisory board. A lot of that charge has been spread out across BCBV, other places. We've had one meeting since 2022, and that was the result of a lot of outreach by the department to get them to review the 2020 board that'll come play them. Each year we send an annual report to the chair and consistently for at least the past four years, the chair's response has been, please sunset the decaf. I'd like to see that happen. That's what I got. That's some summary highlights and recommendations.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: I have a question. It's the question I emailed you earlier, and I can just forward your response to the committee, but I wanted to talk about it a little bit here. So, I'm trying to understand whether there's any practical nexus between the 248A process and the ten year telecom plan. So, other words, it's it's a big plan. There's a lot of pages in it. I fully admit this question occurred to me and I didn't have time to go look it up. But, I I was wondering whether the ten year telecom plan had a state driven guiding plan for here's how many cell towers we need, here's where they should go, here's the timeline at which they should be put up. So in other words, real marching order thing, like here's where we need the towers. And you said it doesn't have that level of granularity, but I wanted to make sure I understood your answer.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: That's correct. It does not include that level of granularity. Some of that work is done that the department is involved in. That was actually the meeting Monday yesterday was canceled due to the snowstorm. But with the personnel, for instance, you're going to go up to the other DPS, the Public Safety and Waterbury, and get together with them and talk about the need for towers and where do we still have spots within the state. The previous Personnel iteration, I believe, or the member of the or what exactly, it was before my time was stood up to offer input on where the first round of towers would get put, but that's not included in the case of Caledonia. The process is separate.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So right now, is the market driving where the tower applications go? It's it's the big telecom companies saying we want a tower there, and we want a tower there, and we want a tower there.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yes. That's correct.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay. And then Torre. Sorry.

[Rep. Christopher Howland (Member)]: Yeah. Madam chair, I think you have, you know, just put your finger at one of the big problems I think the telecom plan has, which is that it is misunderstood by some to be an implementation plan for telecommunications in the state. And it is out it is a resource for those types of companies so that they have an understanding of what's here and what our statutes are and where things are, but it is not an implementation plan. And I think you touched the other piece, which is because most of this is market driven, and most of this we are federally preempted from legislating. It shall go here or there.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Torre?

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Yeah. In that vein, I just wanted to follow-up on the small cell. So that's an example where you're trying to you have a sense that those small cells could be useful for these dead cells, there isn't a market appetite?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yeah. And

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: so what is your goal then? Like, what happens if there's no market?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I think we come up with a different suggestion for the next ten year telecom. I don't think it's appropriate to just repeat ourselves and say we continue to think that small cell infrastructure, we might put that in there just to say we continue to think small cell infrastructure is a good solution. But if there's no appetite, then we can't force that hand with the developers. So we have to think of another method to expand that self-service out of to these dead zones.

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Seems like you could in in the February a process have some carrot. Yep. Like this tower and then because there's this other dead zone. I don't know. It feels like there should be some way of incentivizing a developer to pick up a dead point that's near or somehow you know what I mean? I don't know how that would work, but I feel like we see this in other industries.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: The department's proposal to incentivize those financial

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Okay. Do what actually have the resources.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Order to help this fund that. And I've got St. Elements, LSV is doing all that new year. That's this kind of stuff working with the big three because they own the now that we set this agenda today because it's on surface. There's one smaller Vermont company that has its own piece of bandwidth that we weren't able to come to an agreement with. But prior than that, they've seen Vermont, and even that company had to have agreements with Verizon, AT and T Mobile to run on their network. So at the end of the day, those three owned the network and bought access to the technology. Easy answer. Yeah. Incentivize them to do that. I was thinking about it since I started a few years ago, but I was found one that they're all available to.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: To that point, you you have heard some testimony about the much smaller, like, hands, antennas that go up on, like, utility poles and things like that. Can you explain that technology and what it's good for, you know, what it's not good for? And

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So it's the same as the antennas that are at the top of a big tower. It's smart. Less power, less coverage due to the due to the location, but it's the same cell phone antenna technology that you would see on top of a 100 meter foot guide tower. It's just smaller. Oftentimes, there's stuff to be unidirectional as opposed to AM. So or omnidirectional rather as opposed to AMES. But the technology is the same. It's just a smaller scope. So

[Unidentified Committee Member]: is it viable to especially in travel ways where we have utility poles to, like, the the multiple so that go on on the travel ways too.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I think so. Yeah. I think that's why I put it in that that

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No. I'm not talking about the 50 foot tower. I mean, the ones

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: that just

[Unidentified Committee Member]: go right on the existing floors.

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Yep. That's how Verizon provides coverage at Shelburne. And that was part of the conversation. It's if you would like coverage farther off the roof setting corridor, then there needs to be some macro infrastructure that can extend because right now the coverage is provided by a series of antennas on top of utility poles to go between Shelburne and the and I think some of like, cardiology locations. So

[Unidentified Committee Member]: that is a viable technology and certain

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: From From a technological technological aspect, absolutely. I have no idea how financial or deployment has spiked, but, yes, technology being a viable solution.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And are we getting applications for more of that sort of thing or not for, like

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: Not that often, every once in a while. The one who seems to do that the most actually goes through the active 50 process. She found on there, dug up through active 50 and that's Verizon, but they seem to be using that more often. T Mobile often does, but theirs are not necessarily on top of utility poles. A lot of T Mobile infrastructure seems to be in church peoples or in the top of buildings. Like, next to the top of the pavilion is a T Mobile antenna. So if you have T Mobile service here, it's amazingly fast. So they use other structures to host those antenna arrays.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So we need more churches? Is that what you're saying?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: At least more seapults.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you. And do you have any insight as to why they choose to go through act two fifty rather than the two forty eight process?

[Hunter Thompson (Director of Telecommunications, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I do not. Think it's I can only assume. I could make some wild assumptions, but now I don't have any insight. Thank you.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: All right. Why don't we take a five minute break since we've got a longer presentation coming up next. And Alex, we can go off live.