Vershire, Vermont is a tiny historic town tucked into a narrow valley near the start of the Ompompanoosuc River. For this Orange County town of 730 people and 15 businesses, patience is simply an accepted part of everyday living. Being the smallest town in Orange County, Vershire has been passed over and ignored when it comes to most things. Homes in this town did not receive electricity until the late 1940s and their current unreliable telephone service until 1980. In fact, most cell phones here still don’t get a signal.
However, according to a recent article in Valley News, things have started to look up for this sleepy town, as they were given a chance at high-speed fiber optic Internet service. After much debate between telecom providers and pressure from Vershire residents, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority is putting fiber-optic cable along Route 113 connecting Vershire to a fiber optic loop that includes new service for different cities in the area. In addition, ECFiber was given a lease on 25% of the strands in the fiber-optic cable to provide fiber optic Internet service to at least half of Vershire by the end of the summer.
“We’ll have 20 miles of fiber in Vershire to reach better than 50 percent of the possible customers,” said John Roy, a Vershire resident and treasurer of ECFiber. “With 99 percent certainty, we hope to have half the customers (in town) served by the end of the year. But if everything goes as planned, it very likely will be the end of the summer.”
For Vershire as a whole, having access to fiber optic Internet service will make living and working in this town much easier. One local resident who just got his Internet connected to the new fiber optic network commented that the improvement in Internet speed was like “going from the horse-and-buggy age to the jet age overnight”.
At GeoTel Communications, our fiber optic network maps integrate telecommunications infrastructure data with geospatial technologies so that cities like Vershire can analyze fiber infrastructure in a spatial, map-like environment. If you are interested in obtaining fiber network maps for a particular city or metro area, contact GeoTel Communications at (800 ) 277-2172.
