Five Colleges, Incorporated: Bringing Broadband to Western MA Towns

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Five Colleges Brings Broadband to Western Massachusetts Towns

As the governor's office pursues a $25 million initiative to bring broadband Internet access to western Massachusetts, Five Colleges, Inc., is doing its own part, allowing several underserved Pioneer Valley towns access to its own 53-mile, $3.6 million fiber optic network.

Last spring Five Colleges, Inc. -- a consortium of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst -- completed a broadband network stretching up from Springfield and around the five campuses.

By including capacity far in excess of the needs of its members, Five Colleges left open the opportunity for towns along the network to tap into the extra "dark fiber" at no cost beyond their own expenses of accessing the network. The town of Amherst was the first to take advantage of the offer. The difference, according to those involved, has been dramatic.

"It's like night and day," reports Kristopher Pacunas, information technology director for this town of 35,000 that is home to three of the Five College campuses. "We'd been running on modems and T1 lines before, and now we have more than five times the bandwidth." Amherst went live with the Five College network in September, and now all town services, from the police department to the library to the schools, are tapped in. The town now even offers wireless access to the public throughout downtown, thanks to the network.

Jeff Comenitz, information technology director for the Amherst-Pelham school district, explains that up until September, all the schools in the district, equaling some 1,400 computers, were sharing the bandwidth equivalent of a single home's connection. "Teachers had expectations based on what they could do at home, such as watch a health video from the National Institute of Health," Comenitz says, but when they got to the classroom, the school district's shared bandwidth simply didn't have the capacity to stream video, and other uses were often slowed to a crawl. "The business of doing school would get interrupted as bandwidth was getting choked. We don't have those restrictions now."

Because Five Colleges doesn't charge towns for access to the network, Amherst is able to plow its savings into buying expanded bandwidth from its service provider in Springfield, which connects the town to the outside world. "Where we were spending more than $500 a month for access to two T1 lines, we now have seven times the bandwidth for the same amount of money," says Comenitz.

"There was never a question," about sharing its broadband network with area towns, according to Donna Baron, director of information technology at Five Colleges. "Once we decided we were going to build this ourselves, we knew we wanted to build in the extra capacity to help the region. We knew we weren't the only ones hurt by the lack of broadband in western Massachusetts." She is currently helping the towns of South Hadley and Chicopee hook in to the network.

While Baron is pleased that Five Colleges is able to help its immediate neighbors achieve broadband access, she knows there's a lot more to western Massachusetts than this picturesque piece of the Pioneer Valley, and that the resources necessary to bring broadband to the entire region far exceed those of the consortium. "We're therefore excited to see that the governor's broadband bill is now sitting before the legislature," she says. "We hope that Five Colleges can be part of the broader solution."

Originally created 11/13/07

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