Paulding Putnam Electric Cooperative (PPEC) says it has received $13.2 million in federal broadband grant support to help fund a major fiber-to-the-home expansion to rural unserved segments of northeast Indiana.

According to a cooperative announcement, the co-op will receive $13.2 million in BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) federal grant funding from the Indiana Broadband Office, matched by $10.3 million in cooperative investment, to bring affordable fiber to thousands of unserved residents in Allen, Adams, DeKalb and Noble counties.

PPEC’s fiber network passes more than 18,600 locations in Ohio and Indiana, with the cooperative having formally launched its major expansion project last year.

"This investment will make a lasting difference for the communities we serve," PPEC CEO Randy Price said of the grant award. "Reliable, high-speed internet has become a necessity for education, healthcare, agriculture, business, and everyday life. Many of our members have waited far too long for access to dependable broadband. With support from the BEAD program, we're able to accelerate fiber deployment and deliver a long-term solution that will benefit our members and strengthen our communities well into the future.”

In deployed fiber markets, the cooperative offers symmetrical 250 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $60 a month; symmetrical 500 Mbps fiber for $80 a month; and symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber for $120 a month, with a variety of additional phone, Wi-Fi, and battery-backup add-on options.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe is celebrating the opening of its new fiber network operations center as the Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District (HVPUD) expands fiber-to-the-home Internet service throughout the Hoopa Valley Reservation and into neighboring communities just outside of its Tribal lands.

To mark the occasion earlier this summer, more than 50 community members, Tribal leaders, HVPUD staff, and project partners attended the July 17 opening celebration.

At the celebration, Hoopa Valley Tribal Vice Chairman Jordan Hailey hailed the milestone moment:

“This is truly a great day for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, for the department and for the Hoopa people. It makes me proud as a Hoopa Tribal member and a member of this community to see everything that they’ve accomplished.”

Though the new network operations headquarters is a storage and transport data center, General Manager of HVPUD Linnea Jackson made it clear that it is not a hyperscale/compute AI data center that have sparked controversy and protest in numerous local communities across the nation.

“The (data centers) that are sucking up all those resources — water, land, and energy — those are the AI data centers. Ours is a network hub, not a huge footprint,” Jackson tells ILSR. “We’re talking about servers and rack space for (Tribal) government operations and records, not a demand on our water resources — completely different from a large AI data center.”

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Establishing Data Sovereignty

Three months after town meeting voters in Longmeadow, Massachusetts rejected an $8.6 million proposal to kickstart the construction of a municipal fiber network, Town Councilors in the neighboring town of East Longmeadow moved in a different direction, voting to take control of its digital future and provide its residents and businesses with next-generation Internet access.

The move was formalized earlier this month when East Longmeadow Town Councilors unanimously approved issuing $43.5 million in bonds to finance the construction of a municipally-owned fiber network. 

The vote paves the way for the western Massachusetts town of about 16,000 to finally get the affordable and reliable town-wide Internet connectivity local leaders see as vital for its economic future and improved quality-of-life.

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With pent up frustration of the high cost and unreliable service under the monopoly of Charter Spectrum, the Council also voted to enter into an agreement with Westfield Gas & Electric to build the network, as the municipally-owned fiber provider has done for nearly two dozen other towns in western Massachusetts — with the utility’s subsidiary, Whip City Fiber, to operate as the Internet service provider.

Construction is expected to start in January of 2027 with the first connections lit up for service later that year in the northwest corner of town where the “initially designated (and most dense) neighborhoods” are located.

Six Years in the Making

Oregon’s Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative (CCEC) and its subsidiary Beacon Broadband (BBI) say they have completed the biggest fiber expansion project in the cooperative’s history, dramatically expanding affordable Internet access to thousands of previously unserved rural households in the Southern part of The Beaver State.

Cooperative officials say the six-year, $60 million project was the largest infrastructure investment in the cooperative's 88-year history. 7,000 of the co-op’s 14,000 electrical customers are now subscribed to broadband service after the deployment of 14,000 miles of fiber optic lines that have also streamlined maintenance and monitoring of the electrical grid.

Originally, a CCEC engineering feasibility study estimated the build would cost $45 million, though CCEC’s board later revised the capital budget to $60 million to reflect steeper construction costs due to the rugged, rural coastal terrain.

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To fund the project, the CCEC Board authorized BBI to secure up to $60 million in private borrowing through CoBank.

It was supplemented by several state and federal grants, including a 2020 $14.1 million Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) grant, a $19 million grant from the Oregon Broadband Deployment Program (BDP) to expand high-speed Internet access to over 1,200 addresses in rural Curry and Coos counties, and a $7 million USDA Rural Development grant.

HomeWorks Tri-County Electric Cooperative says it has acquired the cable and fiber broadband systems of private ISP Vogtmann Engineering (VEI) in order to expand its broadband footprint across central Michigan. The migration will result in faster, cheaper Internet access for rural Michigan subscribers long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

HomeWorks was founded in 1937 by farmers in Eaton, Ingham and Jackson counties to bring electricity to rural areas left behind by the big-city utilities. It’s one of the country’s 250 electrical cooperatives (out of 900) that have leveraged a century of rural electrification experience to pivot into bringing affordable Internet access to long-neglected Americans.

In 2018, the cooperative launched HomeWorks Connect, which provides Michigan locals with three tiers of fiber service: a symmetrical 250 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $65 a month; a symmetrical 500 Mbps option for $90 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $100 a month. The tiers feature no usage caps, hidden fees, or long-term contracts.

According to HomeWorks, the acquisition of VEI’s network assets includes 15 miles of cable in the neighboring villages of Nashville and Vermontville, passing just over 1,000 homes and businesses.

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Cooperative leadership says they’re just beginning the process to upgrade VEI’s coaxial cable to fiber connectivity, and integrate the existing system into its HomeWorks Connect network, which currently serves more than 14,000 homes and businesses across rural mid-Michigan.

Indiana Cooperatives are once again at the front of the pack as the state prepares to dramatically expand affordable fiber access on the back of $483 million in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grants.

The first round of bead funding is expected to connect an estimated 123,000 Indiana households and businesses that currently have either substandard Internet access, or no access at all. All told, the state’s BEAD deployment plan is slated to expand affordable fiber access to 91 of Indiana's 92 counties.

Last June, the Decatur County Rural Electric Membership Corporation (DCREMC) was the first of the state’s 24 BEAD grant awardees to sign a contract with the Indiana Broadband Office.

The cooperative’s $7.1 million BEAD award will help extend fiber service to roughly 2,800 additional homes and businesses across the rural and sparsely populated communities across Decatur County, including Greensburg, Napoleon, Millhousen, and St. Paul. Most of the construction is expected to be finished before year’s end.

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Decatur County REMC expanded into fiber Internet access in January of 2025 under the Power Stream Fiber brand. Power Stream Fiber currently offers three tiers of service: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $65 a month; a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $80 a month; and a symmetrical 2 Gbps service option for $110 a month.

Late last month, officials from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) and Community Broadband Networks America (CBN America) —  an independently-owned fiber Internet service provider — gathered with dozens of residents at two Southbridge Housing Authority properties to celebrate the expansion of the state's Residential Retrofit Program. 

The event marked the latest milestone for a program that, more than two years after its launch, has grown from a $22 million pilot project into a $74 million initiative to rewire some of the Commonwealth's oldest affordable housing stock in order to allow residents living there faster and more reliable access to the Internet.

For the roughly 150 residents at the two Southbridge properties — many of them elderly, on fixed incomes, or living with disabilities — the occasion really hit home. 

Diane Servant, board chair of the Southbridge Housing Authority and a resident herself, told the crowd gathered for the celebration what the upgraded wiring will mean for broadband-hungry residents.

“It's going to save you money, and that's always a plus for all of us on very fixed incomes,” Servant said. “Some of the perks are you will be able to do telehealth, talk with your children, talk with your grandchildren. It's just going to be fabulous.”

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CBN America is handling the fiber build-out at the Southbridge properties, part of a broader push by the provider into southern Worcester County. In total, CBN was awarded $5.7 million in grant program funds to upgrade wiring in buildings across six different communities in the region, bringing all-fiber connections to 1,820 units, MBI officials tell ILSR.

Moore Haven, Florida-based Glades Electric Cooperative has completed a long-planned fiber broadband network into largely unserved parts of the Sunshine State. The 1,600-mile network, built in conjunction with Conexon Connect, now spans Glades, Hendry, Highlands and Okeechobee counties, and the vast majority of the cooperative’s electrical footprint.

Like so many U.S. cooperatives, Glades Electric, founded in 1945, is leveraging a long history with rural electrification to inform its fiber broadband expansion plans and bring connectivity to those long-stranded by market failure and a lack of Internet access competition.

Also like most U.S cooperatives, the upgrades not only bring affordable Internet access, they aid in monitoring and repairing the existing electrical network.

“In addition to closing the digital divide for our cooperative members, we are pleased to update and expand our communications to our substations, corporate offices, grid connected devices and beyond, as a result of our project and long-term partnership with Conexon Connect,” said Michael Roberge, Glades Electric Cooperative CEO

For many rural Florida subscribers getting fiber for the first time, the speeds and pricing are better than what’s seen in many urban markets.

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Conexon offers locals four fiber pricing tiers: an “Essentials” plan offering 200 megabits per second (Mbps) symmetrical for $59.95 per month; a “Premier” plan delivers up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) symmetrical for $79.95 per month; an “Ultimate” plan offering symmetrical 2 Gbps for $99.95 per month; and the top-tier “Elite” symmetrical 5 Gbps plan with variable pricing.

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.”