NEW SCOTLAND — Residents in rural areas of New Scotland have for years dealt with lagging internet. It’s an issue unlikely to change, according to members of the town board, but a recent development could give locals a modicum of hope. 

“Not to sound like the broken record, but I have to bring it up. When, if ever, will we be getting high-speed internet for the six people in the middle of New Scotland South Road,” resident Sharon Boehlke asked the town board during its June 11 meeting.

Boehlke said no company will run broadband to her area of New Scotland South Road because of its lack of housing density. “We’re being totally discriminated against,” she said. “No one wants to stand up and fight for us.”

Councilman Adam Greenberg told Boehlke, “You’re not being discriminated against,” but access was an issue “all over town.” Greenberg said he and Supervisor Douglas LaGrange had “worked on this for years. We get nowhere with Verizon or Spectrum. We have no power over them.” Greenberg also noted that neither he nor LaGrange have high-speed internet at their own homes.

Greenberg said, “The county tried to set up some radio service, which I think you may want to look at; you can get high speed now through Starlink, through … satellite. It’s expensive, but again, this is another program that was being funded in the Recovery Act that is now probably not going to be funded for these kinds of areas.”

“All over town,” Greenberg said, “it’s an issue.”

The effort to be competitive for broadband is a major lift with towns often required to create their own maps or a list of unserved households that show the level of need more precisely than the maps created by the federal government.

As The Enterprise has previously reported, when the government assesses need, it does so on a census-block by census-block basis, where if just one household in a block has broadband it means that block is “served,” in the eyes of the government. This puts rural communities at a disadvantage because their low population densities mean their blocks cover a larger geographic area.

Greenberg has been dealing with the issue for some time. 

“You know, New Scotland is in this weird spot,” he told The Enterprise in 2020, explaining that there were areas of town, like the northeast quadrant and Voorheesville, that are more suburban, and, “you could consider us more like Bethlehem or Guilderland in terms of the utilities and the coverage but you get outside of those areas and we’re like the Hilltowns.”

Outside of Voorheesville and the towns’ hamlets — New Scotland, New Salem, Clarksville, Heldervale, and Feura Bush — service is needed, Greenberg said at the time, adding there’s a need in some of those hamlets as well. 

Boehlke was told on June 11 that, historically, the town has had limited power to influence major internet providers. The town’s contract with Spectrum expired four to five years ago, and until recently, there was no impetus for a new one, LaGrange said, but a recent development may have shifted that dynamic. 

Spectrum informed the town that a new, signed contract was required, which LaGrange believed to be mandated by the state, giving New Scotland potential leverage to extract promises from the company. 

“Because, when I first started talking to them, they said they weren’t going to do anything new,” LaGrange said. “And so I said, ‘OK, I’m going to just sit on this, and it doesn’t hurt us.” But now Spectrum has said it is required to have a contract signed, he said.

LaGrange went on, “And so there may be some leverage there. I have my doubts, and I don’t have high hopes, but now they need us, apparently, to some degree. Who knows what? You know? They wouldn’t have sent me a letter if they didn’t need it.”

LaGrange said, “They need our money. They need my signature. So they’ll get neither if they don’t offer us up something.”