HOULTON, Maine — The Houlton Rotary Club met for its weekly luncheon meeting on July 10. Jake Plissey was inducted as a new member by Rotarian Leigh Cummings. Also present was the guest speaker, Tim McAfee.
The club is gearing up for the Rotary Annual Auction with its first committee meeting at the Houlton Higher Education Center on July 26, chaired by Sergeant-At-Arms Tracy Rockwell.
Rotarian Steve Bither introduced his guest speaker. McAfee grew up in Hodgdon and is married with three children. McAfee is the CEO of Pioneer Broadband and he shared a powerpoint slideshow about fiber optics.
As a member of the Fiber Broadband Association, McAfee and his team have been installing this infrastructure in Houlton since 2010. This is an expensive, but cutting edge technology that is in place to expand and is attractive to businesses. It can be used to draw people and business to the area.
Most of the town of Houlton currently has this service and the areas to be expanded would be the Ludlow Road past Walmart; the Houlton trailer park and the Houlton Band of Maliseets’ reservation. A total of 2,822 homes have the option of a fiber optic connection in Houlton. These connections are not shared as there is one fiber connection to each property.
Each connection individually returns to Pioneer Broadband. About 96 percent of homes and businesses in Houlton have cable as opposed to the older copper technology and this places Houlton as one of the leading communities in Maine with this service. The advantages to fiber over copper is that it has a glass core and is light based, not electric based and is not degraded by water, solar flares, or electric outages.
In 2017 an all HD-TV package became available to customers and a smaller package with 70 channels became available. Towns with this service include Houlton, Hodgdon, Linneus, Calais, Presque Isle and Bridgewater. McAfee can be reached at Pioneer Broadband at 532-1254 and the website is pioneerbroadband.net.
