Los Alamos County, New Mexico is inching closer to the launch of its “Atomic Fiber” county-wide open access fiber network, recently announcing they’ve received signed contracts with the partner ISPs that will be tasked with providing affordable fiber access to local residents.

An announcement by the county indicates that they’ve signed agreements with four providers:  XMission, Anthem Broadband, Intellipop, and LANet. The county says network construction is still slated to begin this spring (likely April). Some locals are expected to be connected by the fall of 2026, with network completion expected sometime in 2030.

As with most open access fiber networks, locals will eventually have the option to quickly switch between multiple competing broadband providers in pursuit of the best price, speed, customer service, and performance.

Bonfire Fiber (Bonfire Engineering & Construction LLC) is the primary partner contracted by Los Alamos County to design, build, and operate the Atomic Fiber Community Broadband Network (CBN). County officials previously told ISLR that the total network cost is expected to be around $35 million, and the finished network should pass 10,014 addresses.

A 2023 Strategic Leadership Plan adopted by the County Council identified that broadband is an “essential service,” stating that a county-owned community broadband network would be a top priority to improve economic vitality of the county. So in late 2023, the county issued a project request for proposals (RFP).

Bergen County, New Jersey officials say they’re making significant progress on their plan to dramatically expand Bergen County Fiber – the county’s new municipal fiber Institutional Network (I-Net) – with recently completed deployments in communities like Little Ferry and Lodi.

The I-Net doesn’t provide broadband access directly to local residents, instead focusing exclusively on providing alternative fiber connectivity for communities, municipalities, and key anchor institutions. As a result county leaders say participating local municipalities are already seeing dramatic discounts - with some halving their monthly costs already - over regional location enterprise-scale fiber providers.

Image

Plans for the Bergen County Fiber were announced in February of 2024 after a two-year collaborative effort between the county’s IT department and Millenium Communications Group, which began the project by installing fiber to most key anchor institutions including municipal buildings, schools, and regional libraries.

From there, the county has steadily expanded access to fiber that’s significantly cheaper than anything provided by regional telecom monopolies Verizon (FiOS) and Optimum, recently culminating with launches in municipalities starting with Little Ferry (population 11,000), and expanding to Hillsdale (population 10,266 ), and Lodi (population 26,000).

On the most recent episode of the Connect This! Show, the panel was joined by California-based Internet Exchange builder Matt Peterson of SFMIX. Matt has been in the broadband space for many years on the deployment and operations side of the wholesale and peering system, and joined the show today to talk about the need for better, more practical, more forward-thinking middle mile networks across the United States. However the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD) ultimately ends up, if we want to see more competition and the most efficient use of public dollars there is no doubt that we will need additional infrastructure connecting those last-mile networks that hook up businesses, residents, and community anchor institutions around the country.

These are the networks that connect our networks back to the larger Internet; they traverse county roads and state highway systems. Some are owned by and exclusive to the largest providers, like AT&T. Others, like Project THOR in Colorado, were collectively built to increase resiliency for the public good, as well as stimulate last-mile retail service in underserved and unserved parts of the country. California is in the midst of multi-billion dollar middle mile endeavor, and a handful of others states are likewise making significant investments. 

So the question is: are we building enough middle mile in the United States, and equally importantly, are we building it correctly? With all sorts of public and private interests involved, and networks that are often measured in the thousands of miles (or tens of thousands of route-miles of fiber), often with public money, it's an important thing to get right.

We wanted to underline the importance of these things by featuring this segment of the show. The panel talks about the consequences of decisions about everything from where these networks are built, how they are funded, transparency and marketing, and the importance of talking to the last-mile operators that will be interconnecting with them. 

Watch Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) with regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting), joined by special guest Matt Peterson (SFMIX) talk about it all below. 

The middle-mile discussion starts at the 36:00 mark.

This week, we bring you a special field report from Maryland-based radio and podcast producer Matt Purdy. Through interviews with citizens, digital equity advocates, and the city's new Director of Broadband and Digital Equity, Purdy documents the connectivity struggles that have persisted in Baltimore's historically marginalized neighborhoods for decades.

Those challenges have only become more pronounced with the pandemic, prompting local officials to begin making moves in the direction of something we've not yet seen in a community the size of Baltimore: building a city-owned, open access fiber network.

This is a great story, so we won't give anything else a way. Listen below, or here.

Fairfield City, California is one of several cities in the state hoping to lean on both California’s broadband expansion initiative and the American Rescue Plan Act to provide faster, less expensive Internet access for city residents. The city says it will soon exit the research phase of its project and outline what they believe is the best path forward.

Last May the city council approved a plan to deploy a city-owned broadband network to expand broadband options in the city using Rescue Plan funds. Last August, the city launched a Broadband Action Planning (BAP) process to measure the scope of Internet access gaps and propose a solution, the results of which will soon be shared with the city council and the public.

Digital Divide Exacerbated

Like so many U.S. communities, the lack of affordable, equitable Internet access was particularly pronounced during the Covid crisis, the city said. 

“Access to broadband is becoming a prerequisite for improving economic and social welfare,” Fairfield City Communications Manager, Bill Way, told ILSR. “It provides a conduit to enable open and accessible government, enhance business competitiveness, and improve the quality of residents’ lives through improved delivery of services such as telework, telehealth, distance learning, and digital inclusion.”

The city recently completed a survey of community members, and the majority of the almost 300 responses cited limited competition and a lack of affordable Internet access options. 

“While a few comments were positive, most comments indicated lack of options, low speeds, and high costs,” Way said. “One specific consideration to note, although city staff coordinated with outside agencies to cast a broad reach for the survey, and utilized in-house engagement efforts, the responses did not generally capture vulnerable populations, most at-risk of being digitally excluded.”

Hampton Roads, a metropolitan region bordering the Chesapeake Bay in southeastern Virginia, is known for its 17th century historical sites, shipyards crowded with naval aircraft carriers, and mile-long bridge tunnels. Home to 1.7 million Virginians, Hampton Roads is now looking to broaden avenues for economic development by leveraging existing transatlantic subsea broadband cables to transform the region into a technology-forward digital port. That’s why regional officials recently issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) seeking one or more private partner(s) to construct a regionally-owned 100-mile, open access fiber ring.

Private partners interested in responding to the RFP [pdf] must do so by August 24, 2021. Potential partners can decide to offer some or all of the project functions, choosing to: design, build, finance, operate, and/or maintain the regional fiber ring. (See instructions on how to respond to the RFP, as well as details on the selection process, under Section IV on Page 7.)

Five of the nine cities that make up the region colloquially referred to as “the 757” - Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, and Virginia Beach - banded together to improve local fiber connectivity in 2018, forming the Southside Network Authority (the Authority). 

According to the Authority's RFP, the project was undertaken to resolve the broadband issues faced by the cities, including:

• a need for more and more affordable internal connectivity for governmental operations

• equity and affordability concerns in general as compared to similar metropolitan areas

• a perceived lack of responsiveness by incumbent providers to the needs of the business community and economic development prospects

• a relative lack of broadband infrastructure by comparison to comparable metropolitan areas

• and concerns about the security and scalability of existing, privately-owned regional networks

Regional Impacts

On Episode 13 of Connect This!, co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) are joined by Reid Fishler (Senior Director, Hurricane Electric) and Fletcher Kittredge (CEO, GWI) to talk about the issues that come up in building and maintaining backhaul routes and exchange points. During the show they discuss whether creating a small, rural ISP far from an exchange point is easier or harder now than it was 10 years ago. They talk how resiliency, competition, capacity, reliability, efficiency, cost, and innovation play into the topic, current middle-mile issues in California and Maine, and what the future of the space might look like.

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.

Watch here, or below.