The city of Willmar, Minnesota (est. pop. 21,000), has voted to move forward on plans for a city-owned open access fiber network. The $24.5 million investment, which saw finalized approval by the Willmar city council earlier this month with a 4-3 vote, aims to drive accountable, affordable, fiber access to long underserved parts of the city about 100 miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

In its 4-3 vote in early March, the City Council opted to continue work on the Connect Wilmar Initiative, something it says is an answer to the ongoing failures by regional incumbent telecom monopolies to provide uniform, high quality, high speed, affordable Internet access.

“Local internet providers were not interested in improving Willmar's internet infrastructure,” the city says. “After soliciting proposals, the city chose to partner with Hometown Fiber, aligning with Willmar’s long-term vision to provide fast, reliable internet through an open-access fiber network.”

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The decision to move forward on the network comes after several years of careful planning, starting with the creation of a city broadband committee in September of 2022, and a mapping of local broadband access (or lack thereof) completed in December of 2022.

For Angela Diahkah, what started as a self-described “side hustle” is now her full-time job.

Diahkah – or “Ange,” as she sometimes goes by – is five years into serving as Network Operations Supervisor and Digital Navigator Program Manager for JNET, the Tribally-owned broadband provider for the Pueblo of Jemez.

Just 50 miles northwest of Albuquerque, Angela leads the charge in building a new fiber network, the gold-standard of Internet connectivity, that once complete will serve her community (one of the 19 Pueblos in New Mexico).

Last week, she was at the 17th Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB) in Aguana, California in the hills above Temecula Valley, along with a half dozen JNET technicians-in-training and JNET Director Kevin Shendo. The 30 or so other TBB participants – representing broadband leaders from several other federally-recognized Tribes – were also there for the three-day immersive learning experience focused on building and operating Tribal Internet networks.

Held in different tribal regions several times a year since the initiative began in 2021, this most recent bootcamp was back at TBB co-founder Matthew Rantanen’s “RantanenTown Ranch.”

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“We're basically trying to find a light in a dark tunnel and just work with what’s best for us,” Angela told ILSR in describing why she and her JNET crew had come, just as they are in the early stages building out their own fiber-to-the-home network.

“We want to expose them to the network,” literally and figuratively, she said.

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.”

Consider this your invitation to the first Community Broadband Film Fest.

Slated for March 27 from 4 to 4:45pm ET, the livestream event will feature the world premiere of “Building Fiberhoods in Holland” – a mini eight minute documentary on how the city of Holland, Michigan came to build a municipal broadband utility to supercharge its local economy.

The short film tells the story of how – after almost a decade of consideration, education, planning – Holland, Michigan embarked on a mission to build a city-owned fiber network offering fast, affordable, world-class Internet service.

Narrated by key leaders in the city of 33,000, viewers will learn how and why the city established its own municipal broadband utility to solve its local connectivity challenges.

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Hosted by ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks team and the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), the event will kick-off with virtual red carpet introductions of some of the film’s stars, including Holland Mayor Nathan Bocks.

After the screening, viewers will be able to engage the real life cast in a bit of Q&A.

Many rural healthcare facilities are struggling to keep their doors open. Some have been shuttered. Add to that the looming federal budget crisis threatening to end Medicare payments for telehealth and the urgency of what a coalition of Vermont healthcare leaders, librarians, and state broadband officials are doing comes into view. 

It’s called VITAL VT (Virtual Integration for Telehealth Access through Libraries in Vermont) – an exploratory effort being launched with a $10,000 grant from the Leahy Institute For Rural Partnerships, working in collaboration with the University of Vermont Medical Center and the Vermont Library Association.

The aim is to leverage the state’s unprecedented deployment of community-owned fiber networks and create a scalable, community-centered telehealth model. 

“We’re really looking to find any way to make any of our community members in Vermont get access to care – easier, better, quicker. So we’re wondering if telehealth (hubs) might be the right answer for that, if we’re able to put it right in people’s libraries, right in their own towns,” Roz King, chief of research for emergency medicine at the University of Vermont, told local CBS affiliate WCAX.

Data-mapping ‘Healthcare Deserts’

In speaking with ILSR this week, King said what spurred the initiative was a talk given by one of UVM’s medical students who noted how Vermont was beginning to see “healthcare deserts where in some rural counties PCP’s were aging out and no one was there to provide healthcare (services).”

Oswego County, NY officials are celebrating the award of a new $26 million New York State grant aimed at dramatically expanding affordable fiber access to long-underserved rural communities in the northwestern part of the state, just north of Syracuse.

According to the announcement by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, Oswego’s latest grant award will help fund the deployment of 345 miles of new fiber infrastructure to largely rural unserved regions, helping to bring affordable broadband access to nearly 11,000 homes, businesses and community institutions across 22 towns and villages.

Oswego County will own the finished open access network and lease the fiber to Internet Service Providers (SPs), including Empire Access, "on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis."

Empire, a family-owned ISP and named the fastest ISP in the nation by PCMag in 2021, currently offers local residents symmetrical 500 Megabit per second (Mbps) service for $50 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $65 a month; and symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month.

California ISP Onward, which has increasingly partnered with California cities to expand affordable fiber access, is leveraging $4.7 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) broadband grants to further expand its footprint into long-unserved areas of San Diego County.

According to a recent announcement, San Diego county’s Broadband Committee has approved nearly $9 million in ARPA broadband grants to help expand fiber access to 1,000 residents in three unincorporated areas:

• $4.7M awarded to Onward to deliver high-speed internet service to 281 households in Warner Springs.
• $2.7M awarded to AT&T to deliver high-speed service to 101 households in San Dieguito.
• $1.5M awarded to AT&T to deliver service to 53 households in Ramona.

The county says a Notice of Funding Availability was shared with all known Internet Service Providers in the County back in July of 2024. The County requested grant proposals through public outreach and engagement based on findings from its Comprehensive Broadband Plan.

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The effort is running parallel with the San Diego County Library Tech Connect Program that has provided 7,000 Google Chromebooks and MiFi hotspots with unlimited data plans to residents and students to the internet for free.

The Onward website states that the planned $4.7 million expansion into Warner Springs is still in the planning stage, but that once completed the fiber options will be between 10 to 100 times faster than existing offerings. Onward has also partnered with Rancho Cucamonga to dramatically boost access elsewhere in San Diego County.

Since it first broke ground in 2014, Longmont, Colorado’s city-owned NextLight fiber network has won numerous awards and inspired countless communities nationwide.

Now the popular community provider has reached another milestone: it now delivers next-generation affordable fiber access to 28,000 area residents.

The municipal broadband provider also announced that ongoing community support means the city is on track to repay its construction bond by the 2029 due date.

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“NextLight currently passes about 90 percent of the 47,000 premises in Longmont,” NextLight’s Scott Rochat told ILSR. “So at present, we serve about two-thirds of those homes and businesses. We’re delighted to see that so many in the community have chosen to make NextLight their choice for internet service, and we keep welcoming more.”

Last year, Rochat told ILSR the network passed 42,000 premises and was seeing a 64 percent take rate in Longmont.

The network has been so popular locally that officials have pushed the fiber network into neighboring areas, funded exclusively by subscriber revenues and money set aside for capital projects, with no bonding or other supplementary funds involved.

The Arkansas State Broadband Office – ARConnect – continues to leverage American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to drive affordable fiber access into underserved parts of the Natural State.

Three funding rounds are winding their way to completion, as fiber connectivity is being made available to rural markets for the first time, with a heavy reliance on local cooperatives.

ARConnect officials say they’ve now awarded more than $534 million in grants that will expand access to 130,000 locations in total, with most of the projects completed by 2030. Including matching funds, $1 billion is expected to be invested in total, bringing notable improvements to an estimated 875,000 Arkansas residents.

The Arkansas ARC Grant Program began in February 2021, using federal Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) Program funding propped up by ARPA, which both Republican Arkansas state senators voted against.

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As of last December, state officials have committed all but $4,832 of its $1.57 billion in ARPA funds to active projects in the state.

ARC Round 1 doled out $118 million in grants to 76 projects, expanding access to approximately 55,700 homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

ARC Round 2 awarded $274.4 million in grants to 87 different projects, impacting approximately 54,000 homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

The Volunteer Energy Cooperative (VEC) in Birchwood Tennessee says it’s leveraging American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to expand affordable fiber access into long underserved parts of The Volunteer State.

Roughly 10 percent of residents in the unincorporated areas of Hamilton County, Tennessee lack access to broadband. A problem that’s probably worse given the notorious unreliability of FCC broadband mapping data. Tennessee is currently ranked 24th in the nation in terms of broadband availability, affordability, and speed.

Enter VEC, which has begun construction on a new fiber expansion plan that will bring affordable fiber access to nearly 300 homes in Birchwood thanks to a $615,617 ARPA grant.

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“Whether it’s educational, or if it’s business, even this community center that we’re in today, if you’re going to have opportunities for the youth, you have to connect to the internet,” VEC CEO Dion Cooper tells local CBS affiliate WDEF 12.

VEC’s fiber expansion will extend fiber-optic lines along Birchwood Pike from Highway 60 to David Hill Road, later expanding westward toward the Tennessee River and eastward along Grasshopper Road to Pierce Road. In addition to the fiber expansion, Hamilton County recently secured a state grant to develop a modern computer lab at the Birchwood Community Center.