IMPORTANT BROADBAND INTERNET COMMITTEE INFORMATION:
Fiber is coming to Northport – GWI
The Broadband Internet Committee next meets on Thursday, February 10, at 5:00 p.m. at the Town Office. The meeting dates may change so please check in often.
Broadband Internet Committee members are:
Committee Chair Ann Frenning Kossuth has been coming to Northport all her life. Now that her family lives here full-time, she looks forward to helping bring better Internet service to the town. She is in awe of the wide-ranging talents brought to the table by the rest of the team.
A third-generation Bayside kid, Julian Sheffield bought her year-round home in Northport in 2003 and retired here in 2018. She has managed IT for various companies since 1984, and she is tired of taking turns on pathetic Internet. She now hopes to assist the Committee to improve service for all.
Recent transplant Brady Brim-DeForest has spent his career building technology-driven companies. Today he leads Theorem, a product engineering and innovation consultancy that helps the Fortune 1000. He has experience with community-built and community-managed fiber networks and is excited to help elevate standards for residential and commercial connectivity across Northport.
Born in Belfast, raised in Northport, Karl Beiser worked for many years as librarian/technology project manager for the Maine State Library. Though retired, Karl continues to value and support enhanced Internet connectivity, not only for the general good, but also to support his part-time business providing training services to libraries.
Bill Frysinger recently retired after starting and owning a Servpro franchise in Belfast. Prior to that he was a design engineering project manager for medical devices. He has been struggling to get decent home internet access for years and is delighted to be part of this community effort.
* For a Zoom link to the meetings, please email [email protected]
For a link to the Broadband Internet Committee Meeting Agendas, click here.
For a link to the Broadband Internet Committee Meeting Minutes, click here.
Committee Mission –
To provide every home and business in Northport with access to affordable, high-speed, state-of-the-art Internet service.
NBIC Guiding Principles –
- Bring to Northport residents and businesses secure, affordable, reliable, competitive, sustainable and forward-looking Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) Internet service that meets community needs now and well into the future
- Establish minimum symmetrical speed of 100/100 Mbps, and capable of 10Gbps service, for any network Northport builds or provider Northport contracts with.
- Work with residents and businesses to find solutions where FTTP is not feasible.
Town charge to Broadband Committee (see link for original PDF).
Northport’s broadband committee is trying to get better broadband penetration into our town and particularly our unserved and underserved rural areas.
One of the challenges is that the Federal government considers Northport adequately served with broadband and ineligible for funding. The Maine Broadband Coalition has created a speed test map to correct this misconception, and your participation would help Northport families get better connectivity.
This is a very simple test and doesn’t save any information except what you give it explicitly, and Maine Broadband Coalition would like you to check back and run it more than once at different times of day. If you could participate it would be wonderful, if you could forward this to your friends and acquaintances on the back roads of Northport it would help a lot too! Thanks.
Please run the following speedtest from your Northport home as soon and as often as possible:
https://www.mainebroadbandcoalition.org/speed-test-info