By Kristen Levine
LAMB, or Local Area Municipal Broadband, is on its way to Sterling. The fiber optic system boasts superior speed and ease of use compared to traditional Wi-Fi providers, at a much more affordable cost. Darren Borge, the general manager at Sterling Municipal Light Company, discussed the process of introducing the new system into Sterling.
“LAMB is a byproduct of the original I-Net fiber system we put in and got a grant for with the Town Select Board and the town of Sterling, where we ran fiber optic cable from Shrewsbury Electric through Boylston, to West Boylston, into our 50 Main Street building,” Borge said. “From there, we tied all the town’s departments along the fiber route together through the town’s I-Net System.”
Like many things during the 2020 pandemic, the I-Net installation stalled with quarantine.
“We started the I-Net project in December 2019, where we started running cable,” Borge said. “The conversations and engineering and studies started many years before that. The pandemic that spawned it, when everybody abruptly quarantined to stay home, then schooling and workforce went from being on-site to remote, you just saw the existing infrastructure and the burden people were facing on it. It’s an old, outdated system not originally built to be bidirectional, which is what it’s being used for today.”
Bidirectional internet refers to the process in which communications transmit in both directions, in a literal “send and receive” of information, taking turns as data is sent out and then received back. With the increased traffic during quarantine, the system became overburdened. This meant sending and receiving would lag, making for slower loading and streaming time as connections tried to keep up with demand. With installation waiting until the quarantine could be lifted, it strengthened the case for LAMB’s speed, power and accessibility.
“With the development and the improvements of fiber optic internet and cables and service providers, and with Selco [Shrewsbury Electric and Cable Operations] being an internet service provider, we were able to work out a deal where we would buy our broadband from another municipal,” Borge said. “We buy from retail, and then offer it to our customers at a better competitive rate than what the existing broadband infrastructure and other internet providers were offering.”
“Everybody’s going through the hardship of the pandemic and the economy. If we could find a way to offset some of those costs and help our own community, that was our main priority and goal,” he added.
Installation for LAMB has been relatively smooth, with what Borge noted as the usual “little bugs, glitches and hurdles”.
“There’s things you don’t expect. With fiber optic, it’s very minute to where each strand of fiber going from the distribution cabinet to the customer’s house is the diameter of a human hair,” he said. “There’s splicing, calibrating and certification you need to do to make sure you don’t get reflection or light loss that would effect end-user internet experience.”
Borge noted that the difference in service would be quickly noticeable.
“Speed and quality of service…. with fiber, inside your home it’s data but once it gets on to our system it’s light passing light. There’s no traffic; your neighbors [using Wi-Fi] aren’t going to affect your service.”
Unlike traditional copper cable systems that send electrical signals, fiber optic internet transmits information through light pulses. Copper systems have a speed of about 300 Mbps, or megabits per second. The higher a Mbps speed, the better speed an internet connection has. Fiber optics are capable of speeds up to 1000 Mbps. This speed has been made available as a resident internet plan on the Energy Sterling website, along with several other plans at 250, 500, and 750 Mbps for Sterling customers at competitive prices.
As the rollout continues, with rates and plans available to browse on the Energy Sterling website, Borge has a hopeful view of LAMB’s service to Sterling in the future.
“We want to make a good first impression,” he said. “We say what we’re going to offer, we want to offer that and then some. We want what we offer to be better than what the previous vendors were offering and at a better rate…. Hopefully we’re able to offset costs with a better product and a better rate.”