Harbor Fiber Co-op Completes Phase Two Underground
Symmetrical gigabit reaches the west ridge after a winter of conduit work that tested patience on residential streets.
Harbor Fiber Cooperative lit its phase-two network on the west ridge this week, bringing symmetrical gigabit service to roughly 4,200 additional addresses.
The build ran underground after residents rejected a denser pole attachment plan. That choice added cost and months, but reduced visual clutter along the ridge roads.
The cost of that choice is now a known number rather than an estimate. Aerial attachment had been budgeted at 1,180 per passing. Trenching came in at 2,940 — 149 percent higher — and the phase ran twenty-three weeks against a fourteen-week plan. Nineteen kilometers of the route went in by directional bore rather than open cut, which is gentler on the surface and slower underneath. Two segments on Cormorant Rise hit unmapped clay tile drainage from the 1930s and had to be redesigned in the field.
Take rates in phase one already exceed the co-op’s break-even model.
Board treasurer Owen Kline said new members will see the same transparent pricing, with no introductory teaser rates that later jump.
Phase one, covering 2,600 addresses in the harbor flats, was modeled to break even at a 38 percent take rate by month thirty. It reached 44 percent in month nineteen and sits at 51 percent now. That surplus is the only reason the ridge overrun did not force a rate change, Kline said. The co-op’s residential gigabit price is 74 a month, unchanged since 2023, with a 12 discount for members who prepay a year. There is no promotional tier and no equipment rental line.
“I get asked constantly why we do not do a first-year special,” Kline said. “Because the second year is where the anger lives. We would rather sign up fewer people who stay.”
## Twenty-three weeks of somebody’s street
The engineering ran better than the neighborhood relations, and the co-op says so. Field operations lead Marisol Trench keeps a binder of the 412 complaints logged during the phase. Driveway access accounts for 168 of them. Noise before seven in the morning, 74. Damage claims, 39, of which 31 were paid and settled at an average of 640.
Bram Odell, who has run a small ceramics studio out of a garage on Wren Terrace for eleven years, is one of the eight claims still open. His kiln draws heavily and needs a clean power window; he says two unannounced service interruptions during the bore work cost him a firing and about 2,200 in commissioned work. The co-op disputes that its contractor caused the second outage.
“I am a member. I voted for this,” Odell said. “That is exactly why it stung. A commercial carrier would have ignored me and I would have expected it. I kept getting told I was an owner while someone was parked across my door.”
Trench does not push back on the characterization. She says the co-op’s notification standard — a door hanger 48 hours ahead — was written for aerial work and was simply wrong for a bore crew whose position can shift 80 meters in a morning. Phase three will use a text-message system tied to the crew’s daily plan, and the board has approved a 40,000 line item for a full-time liaison, a role that did not exist during the ridge build.
Competitors have begun advertising fixed wireless along the fringe. The co-op says its edge is symmetrical upload for home studios and clinics that moved online after the hospital’s telehealth expansion. Ridge Air, which launched last autumn, markets 300 down and 30 up at 55 a month with no installation fee. For a household streaming video, that is an easy trade. For the fourteen telehealth practices the co-op counts on the ridge, and for the audio post house on Gannet Lane that pushes 90-gigabyte project files nightly, the upload asymmetry is the whole argument.
Engineers involved in the rollout described the first ninety days as integration work more than invention. Legacy cabinets, patchy fiber laterals, and training for field techs dominate the punch list. Sixty-one of the ridge’s addresses are in converted terraces where a single historic entry serves four dwellings, and the co-op has not yet agreed a standard for running lateral drops through a shared stair without opening a wall.
## Phase three, and a room in the port authority building
Phase three targets the industrial basin and is contingent on a conduit-sharing agreement still under negotiation with the port authority. The co-op wants access to an existing duct bank running under Dock Road that was installed for rail signaling in 1988 and is, by the port’s own survey, 60 percent empty. Using it would cut the basin build by an estimated 1.9 million.
The port has not said no. It has said that the duct bank is a security asset, that any shared occupancy requires a lease structure its board has never written before, and that its property committee meets quarterly. The next meeting is 11 June.
Kline has attended every one of those meetings since November. He brings the same two documents: a route drawing, and a single page showing that of the co-op’s 6,800 members, 1,140 give a business address in the basin. At the last session he was allotted six minutes and used four, then sat back down and listened to a forty-minute item about gull deterrence on the grain pier.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s technology desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com