THE LAST BROADBAND POLE IN HAWLEY should be operational by Friday, the 12th of March. Yesterday the 4th of March the pole by Richard Yates’s house was made operational and I was connected to the internet. Hussain Hamdan also notified me that he was connected to the internet yesterday and is thrilled with his service.
65 people in Hawley have broadband setups in their home and 58 of those people are actually receiving broadband service. The others are waiting for either the pole by Yates or the pole by Jimmy Scott which will be operational by next Friday.
Anyone in Hawley who does not have broadband currently and would like to be connected should contact Kate Albert at WiValley. Her phone number is 1-603-546-7204. Her email is kate@wivalley.net.
With help from MBI, the state is now fully engaged in the process of permitting the Borden Mountain site. However because of the snow cover of at least 24″ they cannot begin the process until the snow is completely gone and they can evaluate habitat issues as well as other issues. At this point we don’t expect Borden Mountain to be operational until sometime in June.That site is expected to serve more than 200 individual customers and to be a pivot point to increased Network redundancy.
There are two poles on Route 116 on the western side of Savoy that still need to have site work done, antennas installed and power brought to them. All of that is expected to be completed by the end of March. At that point all of the planned infrastructure for the FHMS Network, excluding Borden Mountain, will be complete and fine-tuning and customer connection will follow.
CBRS radios will begin to be installed in the next several weeks and eventually we expect to have installed somewhere between 200 and 300 CBRS radios which will increase the number of customers we can serve and also increase the level of service to some of our customers.
Because of unanticipated monthly charges for using CBRS we will be implementing an FHMS fee which will be added to every customer’s bill beginning in 2022. This fee is expected to be about $3 per customer and will be adjusted annually as we see what kind of additional expenses are incurred.
Thank you for your patience and continued support of the FHMS Network. We hope you enjoy our internet highway.
Kirby (Lark) Thwing
15 Pond Road
Hawley, MA 01339
Flight’s End, Owner
Town of Hawley Finance Committee, Chair
FHMS Broadband Network Committee, Chair
413-339-0124 Home
413-588-6922 Cell
kthwingjr@gmail.com
