In 2020, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled an Internet Master Plan that was one of the most ambitious municipal broadband proposals in U.S. history. 

It detailed a $2.1 billion commitment to deploy publicly-owned, open-access fiber across the city’s five boroughs, promising to reshape how the nation's largest city would connect a then-estimated 1.5 million city residents without Internet access.

Then, Mayor Eric Adams came into office and quietly killed it.

Now, with new Mayor Zohran Mamdani – whose entire political brand is built on making essential services affordable to the people who need them most – pursuing a popular affordability agenda that has energized his base and inspired electoral interest far outside the Big Apple, the prospect for a city-wide municipal Internet network is back on the radar.

Last week, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams – a non-voting member of the New York City Council with the right to introduce and co-sponsor legislation – released a detailed “Get Connected” report calling “for the city to deliver high-speed, low-cost citywide municipal Internet service akin to a public utility,” laying the policy groundwork for what at least has the potential to become the Mamdani administration's signature infrastructure initiative.

The Cost of Killing the Master Plan

At a press conference with advocates and tenants at the Grand Street Guild Housing Complex, where NYC Mesh has successfully installed fiber connections, Williams said “in the [I]nternet age, we cannot afford to be disconnected, yet many can’t afford to connect.”

Grays Harbor Public Utility District (PUD), a wholesale open access telecom utility in Washington state, will soon enter phase four of an ambitious fiber expansion project that will bring affordable next-gen broadband access to rural residents written off by the monopolies that were supposed to serve them.

The PUD tells local news outlet The Daily World that so far it has deployed 85,885 feet of underground fiber, 201,392 feet of aerial fiber, while installing 411 fiber vaults and completing 604 splices across 17,310 labor hours.

The PUD also states that Phase 4 of the PUD’s fiber internet expansion in south Elma, Porter and Cedarville will be reached later this Spring, bringing access to locals who have been waiting for years for faster, more reliable, and more affordable service. Many folks in these target areas of Grays Harbor County have never seen broadband access at all.

“The only thing was quite a bit of underground construction, and toward the northern part of the project, there’s a lot of private lanes,” Sara Travers, telecom business coordinator with the Grays Harbor PUD, told the outlet. “But everybody has been very eager and accepting because they’re very excited to get broadband.”

Grays Harbor PUD had historically made several unsuccessful bids to obtain Public Works Board grants through the Department of Commerce, before receiving a $6.9 million broadband expansion grant from the Washington State Broadband Office in 2023.

Utah’s UTOPIA Fiber, shorthand for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, says it deployed more than a million miles of fiber and conduit across Utah last year accumulating 67,000 total subscribers, as the collaborative open access fiber provider continues to make steady inroads in transforming the state’s broadband competition landscape.

According to a new update by the organization, UTOPIA not only laid a million miles of fiber across Utah last year, the network continues to see steady subscriber growth and profitability. UTOPIA officials say they also completed their planned Bountiful Fiber expansion one year ahead of schedule.

The UTOPIA expansion into Bountiful broadband fiber connectivity to 13,553 homes and 2,987 businesses, for a total of over 16,500 addresses passed. The expansion had to overcome not just the traditional logistics of a major network build, but a misinformation campaign bankrolled by private telecom monopolies keen on derailing UTOPIA’s momentum.

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UTOPIA was created in 2004 to build and operate an open access fiber network reaching every last home and business in its territory. The open access nature of the network allows competition among 19 residential and over 25 business Internet Service Providers over a centralized shared infrastructure.

In the marathon to bring universal high-speed Internet service to the most rural state in the nation, Vermont is heading into the last-mile stretch of the race with the finish line in sight.

In February, the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) announced that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) overseeing the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, had approved Vermont’s Final Proposal, unlocking $93 million of the state's nearly $229 million federal allocation.

After years of painstaking planning, public input, and navigating bureaucratic hurdles, it marked a pivotal moment – with the state's selected grant recipients cleared to begin deploying mostly fiber to the communities that have long been waiting for high-speed connectivity after decades of neglect from the Big Cable and Telecom providers.

“This is a major milestone for many of our rural towns and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen and revitalize communities,” Gov. Phil Scott said in a statement, crediting NTIA, Vermont's congressional delegation, and the VCBB for shepherding the state's plan.

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U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, never one to mince words, spoke to both the significance and the frustration of the moment. “Affordable, high-speed [I]nternet is a vitally important resource in every corner of the country. It is foundational to modern life,” he said. 

Locals in Longmeadow, Massachusetts say they’re being bombarded with misleading mailers, texts, and phone calls from a telecom-industry linked group trying to mislead the public ahead of a key vote on the city’s plan to begin construction of a municipal broadband fiber network.

U.S. telecom monopolies have a long and sordid history of paying proxy organizations to try and undermine popular municipal broadband deployment projects. The goal is always to mislead, confuse, and disorient the public ahead of key municipal votes in order to shield regional telecom monopolies from reform and meaningful competition.

Such groups almost always pretend to be objective third parties trying to protect taxpayers from harm. But in reality they’re an extension of the lobbying efforts of unpopular regional monopolies, who know that publicly opposing these popular networks isn’t a great look.

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These tactics are popping up yet again this month in Longmeadow, where “dark money” group “Mass Priorities” is working overtime to derail the city’s effort to build its own fiber network.

Longmeadow residents are voting today (May 12) on whether to approve an $8.6 million loan to construct the first phase of what will ultimately be a town-wide fiber broadband network.

The Okanogan County Electric Cooperative (OCEC) and the Okanogan County Public Utility District (PUD) say they’re making steady progress on bringing affordable fiber broadband access to Okanogan County, a highly rural stretch of rugged land in Washington state on the border of Canada.

According to the organizations, the coalition is poised to bring next-generation fiber to as many as 1,366 peppered along the upper Methow Valley this year starting near Chewuch River and ending at Lost River. Many of these areas will be seeing fiber upgrades for the first time ever after years stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

According to a presentation at a town hall last month, officials stated that the project will include 98 miles of underground fiber deployment and 88 miles of new aerial fiber deployment. A mainline backbone fiber between Twisp and Winthrop is completed and functional, providing a redundant loop feed of fiber between the two areas, they stated.

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Construction on the project started back in March, and should be completed by the end of the year, OCEC’s contractor, Shawn VanGeystel of Cannon Construction, recently told the Methow Valley News.

The electrical cooperative’s fiber arm is named MethowNet. It offers three tiers of fiber service, though pricing varies slightly between the North and South Valley.

Daunted by the high costs of building its own municipal fiber network, Flagstaff Arizona instead struck a public private partnership (PPP) in late 2024. A year and a half later and that partnership is starting to drive significant new fiber deployments and some significant new investment to the city of 77,000.

Or that’s at least the conclusion of a new whitepaper by the Fiber Broadband Association, a policy coalition of municipal broadband networks and key fiber industry giants such as Adtran, GFiber, Corning, Calix, and Graybar.

The analysis, "Broadband Community Profile: A Public-Private Partnership for Fiber – Flagstaff, Arizona," explores how the PPP the city struck Arizona-based Wecom Fiber is expected to inject at least $100 million into local economy over five years while saving the city an estimated $18 million in capital expenses.

Frustrated by market failure and a lack of meaningful broadband competition among regional telecom monopolies, Flagstaff considered building its own municipal fiber network in 2023. But city officials found that even just connecting 34 city-owned buildings (estimated to be around $20 million) would be untenable given budgetary constraints.

Roanoke Cooperative’s Fybe has been awarded $2.4 million in state funds to expand affordable access to high speed Internet to 826 locations across eight predominantly rural North Carolina counties that for years have been left lingering in a broadband desert.

Fybe, the cooperative's fiber business, will receive $2.4 million through the state’s Stop-Gap Solutions program to connect 826 locations across Bertie, Chowan, Gates, Granville, Halifax, Hertford, Martin, and Northampton counties. The fiber expansion is expected to be completed by the end of 2026.

“This investment allows us to continue expanding reliable, high-speed internet to rural communities that need it most,” Fybe President Bo Coughlin recently said of the expansion. “Access to broadband is essential for education, healthcare, business growth, and everyday life, and we’re proud to be part of the effort to ensure more North Carolinians can stay connected.”

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North Carolina’s Stop-Gap Solutions program is designed to reach hard-to-access locations and close gaps in broadband coverage. The program is administered by the North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity and is funded primarily through the federal 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

The remote islands of San Juan County, Washington are increasingly being served with next-generation fiber and wireless thanks to Rock Island Communications (RIC), a locally-owned Internet subsidiary of the Orcas Power & Light Cooperative (OPALCO).

Part of a member-owned, cooperative utility that’s been providing electricity to the county since 1937 – RIC is celebrating a decade of what it calls “remarkable growth” for the tall task of remote island deployments to the county of 18,000.

The subsidiary says it just reached 7,000 subscribers across San Juan County, and that its annual revenue has grown dramatically during the last decade – from approximately $1.8 million in 2015 to more than $12.3 million in 2025.

“Over the past decade, Rock Island has also achieved several important financial milestones that demonstrate the success of OPALCO’s long-term vision,” OPALCO’s Krista Bouchey says of the expansion. “The company became cash-flow positive in 2020, and in 2023 and 2024 achieved positive net income, marking a major turning point after years of investing in infrastructure and growing its subscriber base.”

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The San Juan Islands are clustered in the most northwest tip of Washington state, off the coast of the cities of Bellingham and Anacortes, not far from the Canadian border. A little more than a third of the residents of the 20 islands are seasonal, and the lion’s share of the territory is only accessible by ferry.