Risk & Business Magazine F.A. Peabody Insurance Magazine Fall 2017 | Page 31

TV market. An upgrade to this system
required fiber-optic technology, and
Sherman became the first community
to have Gigabit Internet available as a
standard package. Soon after, a huge
investment was made in fiber-to-the-
home (FTTH) technology to the rest of the
network, and by 2016, Pioneer Broadband
(PBB) built a fiber network that effectively
served every home and business in the
town of Houlton.
Today, PBB has fifty-eight miles of fiber
lines in Houlton, offers seventy cable TV
channels in Sherman and Houlton, and
has affordable packages for fiber Internet
and local and long-distance phone
services. Tim McAfee states, “This puts
Houlton (and Sherman) in a place not held
by many communities. It is the only town
in Maine able to claim that practically all
its consumers have access to affordable and
reliable fiber-optic service. It is also one
of the only towns in the state of Maine to
have two competitive, franchised, CATV
providers.”
The project in Houlton has been so
successful that other towns have noticed
and have hired PBB to design their
own municipal networks as they seek
funding to build these networks in their
communities. Tim offers consulting
services to several other Internet service
providers in Northern Maine in an
effort to continue to reach underserved
communities. PBB employs sixteen people,
and its network now reaches from Calais
to Fort Kent and serves over four thousand
customers. Its original goal to “cross the
digital divide” has proven successful and
serves as a reminder to not rest easy on
success for long, because what is high-
speed today is painfully slow tomorrow. +

PIONEER TIMELINE
2001 INCEPTION OF WIRELESS NETWORK
2002 FIRST WIRELESS CUSTOMER
2003 PARTNERSHIP WITH POLARIS CABLE
2003-2004
WI-FI PROVIDER FOR PHISH CONCERTS
IN LIMESTONE, ME AND COVENTRY, VT
2006
ACQUISITION OF CCP WIRELESS, MFX,
AROOSTOOK INTERNET & WWSISP
2007
WINNER OF 1ST OF 40 CONNECT ME BROADBAND GRANTS
WITH UPWARDS OF $1.4M IN GRANTS
2007
FIRST PIONEER REMOTE TERMINAL DSL IN LINNEUS
AND NEW LIMERICK, MAINE
2008
APPROVED AS A COMPETITIVE LOCAL EXCHANGE
CARRIER (CLEC)
2008
REBRANDING FROM PIONEER WIRELESS TO PIONEER
BROADBAND
2010
CONNECTED FIBER INTERNATIONALLY TO BELL
ALIANT, THE CANADIAN TELCO
2011 ACQUIRED SHERMAN CABLE TV SYSTEM
2012 BUILT FTTH IN ORIENT, MAINE
2015 UPGRADED SHERMAN CABLE WITH FIBER OPTICS
2016 COMPLETE BUILDOUT OF FTTH IN HOULTON, MAINE
2017
PBB APPROVED AS CABLE TV PROVIDER IN
HOULTON, MAINE
Tower Groundbreaking 2001
WWW.PIONEERBROADBAND.NET
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