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.

Frustrated by years of substandard broadband service from regional telecom monopolies, Kendall County, Illinois residents have joined the growing chorus of Americans that are tackling the problem head on by building their own better, faster, more affordable fiber networks.

The Kendall County network, part of a public-private partnership (PPP or P3) with Pivot-Tech, is being funded by a tax-free revenue bond.

Kendall County officials tell ILSR that the full cost of the network, which will include private investment from Pivot-Tech, is expected to ultimately be $67 million, serving more than 13,000 locations county wide.

Image

The first phase of the network build will consist of a combination of fixed wireless and fiber last and middle middle connectivity, supported by $15 million in state broadband grants made possible by 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) legislation. Construction is slated to begin this fall, and officials say the county will own the finished network.  

“The network is a combination of fiber and fixed wireless, with the goal to serve as many customers by fiber as possible,” Kendall County Administrator Christina Burns told ILSR. “The fixed wireless access count planned in phase one will be approximately 1,900. The remainder will be fiber to the premises.”

County officials are still finalizing the selection of a consumer-facing ISP.

“We have identified an ISP and are working through the details,” Burns said. “We do still plan for the network to be open access, hoping to bring more ISPs on in the future.”

Like so many communities we cover, the county’s foray into community broadband was forged by decades of local frustration with limited local broadband competition, high prices, and patchy service, which was painfully highlighted during COVID lockdowns.

The towns of Dryden and Caroline, New York have been awarded a new $8.9 million broadband grant courtesy of the New York State ConnectALL program. The award will help deliver affordable fiber capable of symmetrical speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to residents of both towns, which until now, had been trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Launched two years ago, Dryden officials have told ISLR they’re making steady inroads on municipally-owned fiber deployment to the town of 14,500. Now they’re looking to expand the popular local broadband network further into the town of nearby Caroline.

According to an announcement by Dryden Fiber, this latest grant award will help fund the construction of over 125 miles of new fiber to reach 2,650 new residences in Dryden and Caroline. The first customers in Caroline are expected to be online sometime within the next twelve months.

Image

“I find a real partnership between the Town of Dryden, Town of Caroline, and the New York State ConnectALL Office,” Dryden Fiber Executive Director, David Makar says of the award. “Years of hard work and seed planting from elected officials, citizen volunteers, and private partner businesses are now showing up ready to provide top-tier quality broadband service for the residents of Dryden and Caroline.”  

With Big Telecom’s assault-on-competition campaign as loud (and misleading) as ever, a small municipal broadband utility in Massachusetts is quietly showcasing one of the many reasons why building publicly-owned, locally controlled broadband infrastructure is gaining in popularity, racking up awards, and earning high subscriber satisfaction rates in communities across the nation.

With an eye on keeping local dollars close to home for community investments, last week the Westfield City Council voted to approve an $11.1 million bond for a new athletic track and field at the local high school, thanks to the success of Westfield Gas & Electric’s broadband subsidiary Whip City Fiber. And though the return on investment may not be as eye-popping as the $2.7 billion Chattanooga's municipal network, EPB Fiber, has reaped in Tennessee, Westfield officials hailed the community investment as a “huge moment” for local residents.

Peppered by winding country roads and remote islands, Maine exemplifies the challenges in even deployment of affordable broadband. But thanks to tenacious island communities and forward-thinking state leadership, a growing roster of community-owned broadband networks are leading the charge toward affordable access in the Pine Tree State.

Peggy Schaffer, former executive director of the state of Maine's broadband mapping and expansion effort, ConnectMaine, has played a starring role in shoring up Maine’s broadband mapping data after years of federal dysfunction.

Schaffer’s well versed in the broad array of challenges faced by remote Maine communities, and says she’s long been impressed by the “scrappy” nature of Maine’s community-owned island deployments, which have faced down and overcome no limit of onerous challenges in an  ongoing quest to finally bridge the state’s long standing digital divide.

Maine is currently ranked 49th in the U.S. in terms of resident access to gigabit-capable broadband service. Like so much of the country, the state is heavily dominated by regional monopolies that failed to uniformly deliver affordable, next-generation broadband, despite decades of federal subsidies, regulatory favors, and tax breaks.

Now local Maine communities are taking matters into their own hands, beginning with long-neglected island residents no stranger to unique logistical challenges.

Image

‘It’s A Story Of Perseverance’

A massive coalition of more than 300 broadband policy experts and organizations have written a letter to the U.S. government, warning that smaller broadband providers, nonprofits, and municipalities will be elbowed out of an historic $42.45 billion broadband grant program without some notable changes to program rules.

At the heart of their concerns sits the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, made possible by the recently passed infrastructure bill, and administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The grant program is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put a significant dent in America’s longstanding digital divide.

But BEAD program rules currently require grant recipients to obtain a letter of credit (LOC) from a bank, collateralized by cash or cash-equivalent. They also require grant winners to provide "matching funds of not less than 25 percent of project costs," though the latter restriction can be waived in some high deployment cost areas.

While the restrictions were intended to reduce the risk of project failure (a touchy subject for the government in the wake of problems with the FCC’s RDOF program), they require grant recipients to lock away vast and untouchable sums of capital for the duration of any broadband build, most of which last several years.

According to the coalition’s letter to lawmakers, such requirements present unnecessary obstacles for smaller ISPs and cash-strapped municipalities, undermining the infrastructure bill’s goal of equitable, affordable broadband for all.

After decades of frustration, Block Island residents are finally getting access to affordable, next-generation broadband. The Island’s freshly-launched BroadbandBI fiber network is not only utterly transformative for island residents, it’s the first municipal owned and operated broadband network in Rhode Island history.

The first wave of island residents were able to sign up for service in April; the beginning of a staggered deployment rollout island leaders say is very much on schedule. It’s a monumental occasion for the 1,410 island residents spread across nearly ten square miles, who’ll be holding a June 5 event at the island’s Southeast Lighthouse to celebrate the long-awaited launch.

For years, island residents have had to make due with an underwhelming combination of spotty and aging Verizon DSL, or costly and heavily capped satellite broadband—assuming they could get broadband service at all. Private providers generally didn’t see investing in the island community as something worth their time or money.

Running 'A Bit Ahead'

Enter the Town of New Shoreham’s municipal broadband effort: an organic response to market failure, built on the backs of decades of frustration. A network that’s both on budget and on schedule, New Shoreham Land and Finance Director Amy Lewis told ILSR.

Image

“We are running a bit ahead on FSA (fiber service area) openings at the moment and expect to have all subscribers installed and operational in the fall of 2023,” Lewis said.

Last week, the Golden State Connectivity Authority (GSCA) announced it has entered into formal partnership with the municipally owned open access network UTOPIA Fiber, for the Utah-based owner and provider to design, build, and operate a new open access fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network across the 38 rural counties in the state of California. It's a move that not only offers the chance to bring future-proof connections to millions of rural California households in the near future, but have wide policy and industry implications for open access fiber networks down the road. 

Local Governments Band Together

Image

The Golden State Connectivity Authority is a joint powers authority (JPA) created by the Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC), which represents more than three dozen rural counties across the state. RCRC seeks to tackle the variety of shared problems that the state's rural communities face by advancing concrete policy solutions across transportation, energy, natural resources, governance, healthcare, and a collection of other arenas. 

The Searsport Broadband Committee is pushing forward with a plan to bring a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to town residents. The committee hopes to hold a special town meeting soon, where residents will be asked to vote on a bond to pay for it. 

Searsport, Maine (pop. 2,600), known for being “the home of famous sea captains” and the “Antique Capital of Maine,” is certainly not an antique when it comes to the town's perspective on the necessity of broadband and the long-term benefits that come from investing in fiber. 

“There’s a saying, ‘it’s future-proof,’” Searsport Town Manager James Gillway told the Bangor Daily News. “It’s so far ahead of what copper wire does. It’ll give us better connectivity, and we would run it, own it, like any other utility. That way, we can control the cost. We can be super competitive.”

The town recently put out an informational booklet to educate residents on what this network would look like. 

The network is estimated to cost between $2.5 million and $3 million, with the town seeking state grants to help cover some of the costs. Residents will have the option to subscribe for $60 to $70/month with speeds going up to 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). Early news coverage suggests the town would contract with Axiom Technologies of Machias to be the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Like many communities we’ve been covering over the course of the pandemic, working from home and distance learning has really put a spotlight on the need for fast, reliable Internet access in Searsport. 

The town received a $13,000 grant that it applied for back in July 2020 to help boost it’s free public downtown Wi-Fi, which the town believes will “set [them] apart and make [them] more of a destination then a rest stop or pass through town.”

As the oldest son of the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie — the Town of Washington, Massachusetts’ most famous resident — built a name for himself as a singer-songwriter by letting folks know, “You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.”

But if you ask the town’s Broadband Manager Kent Lew, there was one thing that was not on the menu in Washington before last year: high-speed Internet connectivity.

That’s no longer the case as the small town of Washington (pop. 549) has been on the vanguard of rural communities in the hill towns of the Berkshires that have built out (or are in the process of building out) Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks to bring gigabit speeds and affordable connectivity for residents for decades into the future.

The Pandemic: Curse & Blessing

Image

“On the eve the Governor announced the (pandemic) shut down in March of 2020, our first Fiber Service Area was ready,” Lew recalled in a recent interview with us. “It was tremendous that we were able to do this just as people really needed it.”

As one of dozens of Western Massachusetts towns working in partnership with municipal utility provider Westfield Gas + Electric (which operates Whip City Fiber) to build broadband infrastructure, it was in 2015 that Town Meeting voters authorized a $770,000 bond issuance to finance half the construction costs of the $1.47 million network. The other half came from state grant funding.