For the 70 or so residents of Isle au Haut, spending the past eight years acquiring and installing an undersea telecommunications cable that brings universal broadband service to the remote bridgeless Maine island for the first time has been truly a community effort.
Many consultants, contractors and manufacturers did not even respond to residents asking about the purchase and installation of the 10-kilometer cable for the island, half of which is occupied by parts of Acadia National Park.
“We had no experience in getting submarine cable and we looked for options through research and cold calling,” says Sue Foelix, one of four members of the island’s broadband committee.
Finally, the community hired Hoboken, NJ-based Pioneer Consulting in January 2023 to conduct a feasibility study for the approximately $150,000 submarine cable installation, a critical part of the overall project $1.2M Broadband Internet.
“Unlike most of our long-term international projects, Isle au Haut has given us the opportunity to work directly with the end users, the very people, who will benefit from this broadband service,” said Gavin Tully, managing partner of Pioneer. Consultancy
Maine officials helped hire global IT services provider Axiom Technologies for the project funded by a $1.1 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of a larger initiative of $28 million administered by the Maine Connectivity Authority to support the expansion of broadband to underserved rural communities. . The project received an additional $123,000 in state funding.
Installed in November, the submarine cable will bring universal broadband Internet to the island after Axiom completes work on the final Internet connection service to the land connection in Stonington on Deer Isle, which has land connections with the continent Customer service is expected by the end of January at the latest. It’s been a long road since residents began researching the project eight years ago, including state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits. The permit took about a year, with Army Corps approval in November 2023.
“Our community is excited about the fastest new Internet service on the horizon,” says Abigail Hiltz, the first selectwoman and chairwoman of the city’s tax assessor.
Shoestring budget
Residents initially considered building a less expensive microwave communications tower. But with half of the island comprising Acadia National Park, “the idea was not popular because it would affect the view,” Foelix says. “We had to work with the technical and financial feasibility to make the best decision.”
Tully noted that a submarine cable is ideal for communities like Isle Au Haut because it is a future-proof system.
To reduce costs, Pioneer reached an agreement with SubCom, a telecommunications cable manufacturer based in Newington, NH, to allow island residents to rent their own truck to haul the cable.
“SubCom normally wouldn’t even take an order for such a small project, working for the likes of Google,” says Bob Munoz, Pioneer’s submarine cable consultant.
For Muñoz, the project was also much more low-tech and low-cost compared to the multi-hundred-million-dollar trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific undersea systems projects requiring cables thousands of kilometers long that he typically commissions. “This is probably the shortest cable I’ll ever run,” he says.
After obtaining the 1-inch diameter special purpose application cable, the Pioneer team made plans for the installation. While surveying the site, Munoz met Guy Parker, an island clammer who designed the route to lay the 1983 power cable that connects to the mainland and allows residents to power their generators. Parker knew the ocean floor so well that he agreed to mark a path for the new line with buoys to help the team lay the cable. While sophisticated sonar and mapping tools are typically used to map cable routes, “In this case, because the route was short and at the diver’s depth, Parker was able to swim through it and visually pick out the route” , says Muñoz.
Using Parker’s 1983 drawings of the “zig-zag” power cable route, Muñoz tried to follow it closely without laying the new cable on top of the old one. Obtaining data from the 1983 seabed map and a Garmin fishing sonar device obtained from Isle au Haut Electric Power Co. also helped the team cost-effectively map a route for the new cable.
Once the team found a barge to help with the cable laying, Pioneer helped the city hire Gaeaquatic, a Greece-based engineering and construction consultant, to supply three workers to execute the job on a tight budget , says Muñoz. Foelix says the city hired three certified divers, but Gaeaquatic and the city reached an agreement for Gaeaquatic to supply four additional workers for the safety and success of the facility. To stay within budget, the city agreed to cover the additional workers’ airfare, meals and lodging. “They showed up with a team of seven, including two men who drove up with a truck and equipment,” he says.
When it came time to lay the cable on Nov. 8, winds gusted up to 30 knots on the barge, Muñoz recalls, so the team began work around 4:30 a.m. morning of November 10 and was over in approximately seven hours.
“It took the barge three hours to pull the cable to Stonington before the installation was complete at 11:30 that morning,” Munoz says.
Island residents stepped in to prepare the cable landings on the mainland. In Stonington they laid a conduit from the water to the dock and across the road to the terrestrial fiber network connection, Munoz says. On the island, they crossed the pier by installing about 100 meters of conduit to pull the cable, then buried it by hand, he says. “I took a shovel and helped dig part of the trench,” he recalls. It was a do-it-yourself project.”
