Dr. Timothy Nulty is the director of ValleyFiber, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing municipal fiber to towns in rural Vermont. The project originally hoped to bring symmetrical speeds of at least 8Mbps, VoIP and TV to rural areas, using private financing (a fifteen year non-recourse capital lease) where the towns aren’t on the hook in the case of default. The Wall Street Journal today has an excellent read on Vermont’s efforts to get wired, after many carriers (like Verizon) declared the State unprofitable. Interestingly, Fairpoint, who just bought Vermont’s landline and DSL networks from Verizon, wonders who’d want fiber when you can get DSL:

While Fairpoint did take already deployed Verizon fiber service and re-brand it “FAST” (Fiber Access Speed Technology), most markets will only be seeing vanilla DSL. They’re promising to extend DSL into more neighborhoods than Verizon did, though not everybody (particularly union workers) is convinced they have the financial resources to make good on the promise.

Nulty previously made headlines by arguing that the idea that fiber isn’t economical to deploy in rural areas was “nonsense.” However, because banks started failing just as the project began taking off, Nulty and company are now hoping that they can cash in on some of the broadband stimulus money.
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