A group of business and economic development officials in eastern Maine has decided not to sit around and see what the future might bring.

The time for affordable increased broadband Internet capacity has come, they believe, and it is not a question of attracting businesses to the state. If Maine doesn’t act quickly to widen the information superhighway north of Portland, it faces the possibility that existing Maine businesses will become increasingly starved for cost-effective broadband access and have to consider moving away to better-connected areas in order to survive.

“We do only have a short period of time,” Scott McNeil, chief information officer of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, said this week during an interview. “If we let commerce drive this, we will fail.”

Jackson Lab and James W. Sewall Co. of Old Town are two companies with significant broadband needs. Others in the group – Eastern Maine Development Corp., Telford Group, and the Maine Air National Guard – do not yet face the same broadband pressures as Jackson Lab and Sewall Co., but they are concerned about how the availability of bandwidth will determine their economic future and that of the state as a whole.

None of the officials contacted about this topic said their companies were on the verge of leaving Maine because of the lack of affordable commercial-scale broadband access. But the reason they are speaking up, they said this week during a group interview, is that such bandwidth – the kind measured in billions and even trillions, rather than thousands, of electronic data units known as bits – is quickly becoming a necessity for conducting business in the global economy.

“It’s as important as a road,” EMDC President Jonathan Daniels said. “It’s as important as an airport. This is something we need to address now.”

The group hopes to learn how the public and private sectors might work together to make affordable broadband more available in Maine.

If progress toward this goal is left up to simple market forces, they said, Maine may never be in a position to compete with other states that are working to bring affordable large-scale broadband access to their areas. State and local officials in Indiana, New Hampshire and upstate New York, for example, are already starting to address the issue.

“If we don’t achieve something here in a couple of years, you’re going to see a lot of damage [to Maine’s economy],” said Telford Group President Bob Ziegelaar. “Areas that are investing in that infrastructure will attract those families and those businesses [looking to move out of big cities].”

Commercial broadband access does exist north of Portland, but to a limited extent. Jackson Lab, which employs 1,300 people in its mouse genetics and reproduction divisions, has an access line that enables it to transmit 45 million bits of information per second. Though the capacity of any particular type of access line can vary depending on usage, Jackson Lab’s capacity is roughly 60 times the capacity or speed of typical home DSL service, and about 800 times that of regular dialup.

But it still is not fast enough, according to lab officials. The lab’s newest electron microscope can generate as much as 8 trillion bits of data in one day. At its current top transmission capacity, it would take the lab between two and three days of uninterrupted flow to transmit that amount of information to the various data backup sites that it uses around the globe.

Sewall Co. of Old Town, which has 125 employees in Maine and 50 more out of state, is in a similar situation. The company, which provides mapping and geographical information systems services to municipal governments, utilities and the natural resources industry, uses four airplanes for taking digital aerial photographs.

According to Steven Lambert, Sewall’s chief technology officer, each airplane, each day, is capable of generating 40 trillion bits of electronic data for a daily, four-plane total of 160 trillion bits. The firm’s clients generally do not have the capability for storing that volume of data, he said, so Sewall stores it at its office in Elmira, N.Y., where it has wider bandwidth connections than in Old Town, and lets its clients access it over the Internet.

The problem in Maine, Lambert said, is that Sewall has an access line with a capacity of only 1.5 million bits per second, which generally is about 25 times greater than the capacity of typical residential dialup service. To transmit a day’s worth of data collected by the firm’s airplanes over its Old Town access line would take nearly two weeks.

“The data volumes are getting so enormous,” Lambert said. “Pandora’s Box is open. It’s only going to increase.”

Inevitably, when broadband issues are discussed in Maine, the topic turns toward Verizon, a major telecommunications giant which, according to Fortune magazine, earned more than $75 billion in revenue in 2005. Verizon serves 80 percent of the telephone market in Maine, while the remaining 20 percent is divided up among 21 smaller companies.

As a result, Verizon controls most of what Maine has in broadband “backbone,” which are large bundles of fiber optic cable, the highest capacity mode of communications technology there is, according to business and state officials. Because Verizon dominates the infrastructure and because Maine is a relatively thinly populated state, they say, there is little competition and little likelihood market forces alone will help reduce commercial broadband costs closer to what they are in more heavily populated urban centers such as Boston or Atlanta.

“Certainly Maine has challenges with geography, low population and sparse development,” Phil Lindley, spokesman for PUC, said Thursday.

The number of northern Maine companies asking for greater capacity, he said, is not enough to spur the kind of private investment that would be needed to construct a broadband network through Maine that would rival that of one of the world’s largest telecommunications firms.

As it is, some larger northern Maine organizations with growing data needs already are paying broadband bills of more than $50,000 a year, and in rarer cases more than $100,000 a year, according to some business leaders.

Peter Reilly, Verizon’s public affairs director for Maine, disputed claims that there is not enough broadband infrastructure or competition in Maine for commercial service to be readily available and affordable.

Reilly said Thursday that Verizon and its predecessors Bell Atlantic and Nynex have spent “tens of millions” of dollars in recent years to bring large trunks of fiber optic cable into Maine, in part to connect schools and libraries throughout the state with broadband Internet access. The company has cooperated with the state in other ways to improve broadband and cell phone coverage in Maine, he said.

Without naming specific companies, Reilly said there are other Internet service providers in Maine with the ability to provide their customers with large, commercial-scale broadband capacity.

“It’s a pretty robust and widespread network,” Reilly said. “The facilities are available, and not just from Verizon.”

But Verizon’s competitors sometimes rely on the telecommunications giant – and sometimes on regulatory enforcement – for access to the backbone infrastructure that connects Maine to the rest of the world.

One competitor recently had to appeal to the Maine Public Utilities Commission to compel Verizon to give it access to some of Verizon’s “dark fiber,” which are fiber optic cables that are installed and connected but not being used. The PUC regulates utilities such as telephone services in Maine, but not other Internet-compatible industries such as cable or satellite television.

According to a June 1 order issued by the commission, Biddeford-based Great Works Internet complained that Verizon was shirking its mandated obligation to give local telephone service competitors access to its network – in this case by claiming it had no dark fiber available where GWI wanted to expand its service.

The PUC, however, made a different determination. In the order, the PUC wrote that Verizon “unfairly discriminated against GWI” and ordered Verizon to make two high-capacity dark fiber strands available to the smaller company.

The location of these strands is considered proprietary information and is not being disclosed by the parties involved, according to Lindley. Not all sections of broadband backbone in Maine are owned by Verizon, he said.

Acknowledging the challenges of promoting broadband growth in Maine, Gov. John Baldacci and the Legislature agreed this past spring to create the Connect Maine Authority, which will have the power to help directly fund communications infrastructure improvements and to provide incentives for such improvements. The authority, which is expected to meet for the first time next month, also will act as a conduit in applying for U.S. Department of Agriculture loans for broadband expansion projects, Lindley said.

But getting government support is only part of the anticipated solution for fixing Maine’s broadband woes, he said. There also will have to be greater public awareness and a higher level of consumer demand.

“There has to be competitive pressures as well,” Lindley said.