Home to one of the wealthiest and most successful companies in America, you wouldn’t expect residents of Mountain View, California to find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Yet the city of nearly 82,000 – frustrated with spotty and expensive service by AT&T and Comcast – is considering a municipal broadband network to deal with the deficiencies of the duopoly.

Last year, Mountain View officials hired the consulting firm, Entrust Solutions, to take a closer look at the city’s broadband availability metrics and device potential options for the city.

The finished report and accompanying technical memorandum note that Comcast enjoys a monopoly over vast swaths of the city, resulting in expensive, slow, and spotty access.

“Although most of the City is considered ‘well-served’ by federal and California state standards, most residents have only a single option for Internet service and are essentially subject to a cable monopoly,” the authors wrote. “When it comes to modern gigabit Internet services, only 42% of the serviceable addresses have fiber access.”

The study similarly found that despite ongoing taxpayer subsidization, AT&T has historically failed to upgrade its older DSL customers to fiber across large swaths of the city.

“AT&T provides legacy copper-based service for most of the city, but that technology is not capable of meeting the State of California’s minimum broadband speeds of 100 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload,” the consulting firm found.

“And while AT&T also provides fiber-to-the-premises (FTTX) services in limited neighborhoods of the City, this means that much of the City is effectively a Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, leading to an uncompetitive market for City residents seeking broadband service.”

Officials in Carver County Minnesota continue to make great progress expanding affordable fiber access to the county of 111,000 residents, thanks largely to their publicly-owned open access fiber network CarverLink and their partnership with Metronet.

Since its inception in 2013, Carver County has leveraged public and private collaborations and funding with the goal of making symmetrical gigabit (1 Gbps) fiber available to all locations county wide. With the looming completion of its most recent $10.5 million expansion, CarverLink Fiber Manager Randy Lehs told ISLR they’re getting very close to their ultimate goal.

The county currently has ownership and use of nearly 1,200 miles of fiber throughout Carver County and southern Minnesota connecting more than 280 last mile public and community support locations. Many of these markets have no connectivity; many others are stuck on dated, sluggish, patchy connectivity from regional monopolies.

CarverLink doesn’t provide fiber directly to residents and businesses. Instead it long-ago established a partnership with Metronet (formerly Jaguar Communications), to provide gigabit fiber service to businesses and local residential households. Winner of PCMag's “Fastest Major ISP for 2023” award, Metronet provides multi-gigabit fiber to 300+ communities across 17 states.

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“CarverLink also oversees the availability of dark fiber within our network that is available to qualified service providers or other entities using dark fiber for new opportunities–open access, open interconnect fiber,” Lehs said.  “And through our open access fiber, services are also available from Broadband-MN and Arvig.”

In the City of Sherwood, a mostly residential bedroom community 16 miles south of Portland, officials have been quietly cultivating a digital vineyard across Oregon’s “Gateway to Wine Country.”

As part of its on-going work to build out a citywide fiber network, Sherwood Broadband recently secured a $9 million grant from the Oregon Broadband Office Broadband Deployment Program (BDP) to continue expanding Sherwood’s municipally-owned network into neighboring rural communities just outside city limits.

The grant award is part of $132 million in federal Rescue Plan funds the state is doling out to an array of community-owned broadband initiatives for 16 projects across 17 counties.

Award winners include Beacon Broadband, a subsidiary of the Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative ($19.4 million); Jefferson County ($19.2 million); Douglas Fast Net, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Douglas Electric Cooperative ($8.5 million); the Idaho-based member-owned cooperative Farmers Mutual Telephone Company, which offers broadband service in Malheur County, OR ($18.9 million); and a handful of independent providers like Blue Mountain Networks ($6.5 million) and Ziply Fiber ($10.2 million), recently acquired by Bell Canada.

The Boulder, Colorado city council has voted unanimously (9-0) in favor of striking a $9 million deal with Nebraska based ALLO Communications that should ultimately provide fast fiber access to most of the city’s 330,000 residents.

The particulars of the agreement involve ALLO leasing part of the city’s fiber network as part of a 20 year agreement. ALLO will pay Boulder a $1.5 million upfront lease payment and provide the city $2.25 per residential and $9 per business customer per month plus 1.5 percent of revenue from any wholesale lease. The total deal is estimated to be worth $9 million to the city.

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“This achievement stems from a 2018 decision by the City Council to construct a citywide fiber backbone,” city officials said of the deal. “This forward-thinking initiative secured the city's future ability to support various broadband business models, ensuring long-term flexibility and growth in digital infrastructure.”

As per the deal, ALLO will provide broadband service to 80 percent of the city by 2028 and 97 percent of the city by 2030.

ALLO currently provides broadband access to more than 1.2 million customers throughout Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, and Missouri.

In deployed markets, ALLO offers locals two tiers of fiber service: symmetrical one gigabit per second (1 Gbps) for $98 a month, and symmetrical 2.3 Gbps service for $126 a month.

Here at ILSR we’re no stranger to telecom monopoly-backed efforts to mislead the public about the significant benefits of community owned broadband access.

That’s why a new “study” by the industry-backed Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) maligning municipal broadband doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

The study professes to take a look at a very small number of municipal broadband networks, then makes sweeping and patently false claims about the entire sector.

“In most cases, local governments have neither the competence nor the economies of scale to deliver broadband as well as private ISPs,” the study concludes. “So, favoring government-owned networks wastes societal resources, creates unfair competition, and is frequently unsustainable in the long run.”

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There’s numerous problems here. One being that the survey only looked at 20 municipal broadband networks in a country where more than 450 community broadband networks – serving close to 800 different communities – now pepper the American landscape.

The study author acknowledges the study’s sample size was “too small for the data to represent all U.S. [government-owned broadband networks] reliably,” then proceeds to make broad sweeping assumptions unsupported by any actual evidence.

Placerville, California will soon be a place with a municipally-owned open-access fiber network as the city of 10,000 looks to provide its residents and businesses with local choice and more affordable broadband service.

The years-long effort was launched after frustration with what the city’s 2021 Broadband Master Plan described as the “equivalent of an ISP (Comcast) Monopoly.”

“Because of this,” the plan noted, “residents and businesses in Placerville are exposed to the common limitations of monopolies” – a high-priced reality that prompted 98 percent of city survey respondents to say “yes” to a municipally-owned network.

Now, three years after that report was published – and thanks to a $20.1 million award from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Last Mile Federal Funding Account (FFA) grant program – a city that was once nicknamed “Hangtown” is now set to cut the noose of the ISP monopoly.

Montgomery County Maryland has been awarded the “Best Municipal or Public Connectivity Program,” honored as a 2024 Broadband Nation Award winner for its ongoing efforts to expand affordable broadband access and help bridge the digital divide.

Montgomery County has worked extensively for years to connect municipal services and key anchor institutions, but more recently has begun leveraging that infrastructure to expand access to the most vulnerable. The county’s efforts have two key components:

FiberNet is a 650-mile municipal fiber communication network that provides broadband services to 558 County, State, municipal, educational, and anchor institutions.

MoCoNet is the County’s residential broadband network that provides free 300/300 megabit per second (Mbps) Internet service for residents at affordable housing locations. Originally providing a symmetrical 100 Mbps service, the network was recently upgraded to 300 Mbps, and is currently available to low-income housing communities.

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Montgomery Connects Program Director Mitsuko Herrera tells ILSR that the county just received a $10 million grant from the State of Maryland to expand FiberNet and MoCoNet’s free 300 Mbps offering to 1,547 low-income and affordable housing units at seven properties operated by the County’s Housing Opportunities Commission.

The county’s also in the middle of upgrading its core fiber infrastructure to deliver significantly faster overall speeds.  

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the District is poised to use $61.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to “support the construction of community facilities” and expand affordable broadband to underserved communities.

Though details are scant, according to the District’s announcement, the funding received from the Treasury Department will be used to drive improvements for the District’s Southeast Library, the Shaw Library, Library Community Business Centers, the Anacostia Recreation Center, and the Ward 8 Senior Wellness Center. District leaders say they’re also eyeing as-yet-undefined improvements to affordable broadband access across the city of 689,000.

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Rescue Plan recipients are facing an end-of-year deadline to both budget and obligate (contract) the federal funding for use or risk losing the funds entirely.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is making progress across the country to ensure Americans have access to the services and facilities that help them lead healthy lives and access economic opportunity,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said of the funding.

“These resources will deliver critical upgrades at community facilities for residents, particularly students and seniors, that provide essential services like high-speed Internet, financial literacy, and early learning opportunities.”

After two years enmeshed in the unglamorous work of coalition-building, speed test data collection, and pushing state leaders to invest in better telecommunication infrastructure across Oakland’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, digital equity advocates in the East Bay city are finally seeing the fruits of their labor pay off.

The city was recently awarded a $15 million grant from the state’s $2 billion dollar Federal Funding Account, administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The grant will fund the construction of a city-owned, open-access, hybrid middle mile/last mile fiber network – one of a half-dozen grant awards the CPUC approved in the first round of funding, most of which went to support community broadband initiatives.

Courtesy of federal Rescue Plan dollars, the infusion of cash will allow the city to deploy nearly 13 miles of new middle mile 144-count fiber, upgrade almost 12 miles of existing city-owned fiber, and add 9 miles of new last mile fiber connections. As the city’s network is built, it will be connected to the state’s new massive open access middle mile network now under construction.

The FFA grants are part of California’s larger Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at seeding competition and expanding broadband access across the Golden State.

The Oakland project not only paves the way for the city to connect 14 community anchor institutions (CAIs) and nine public safety buildings, it will also expand high-speed Internet access to thousands of unserved and underserved addresses in West and East Oakland.