Last October, Vermont CUD (Communications Utility District) Lamoille FiberNet greenlit a $25 million public partnership with Consolidated Communications. The goal: to finally bring affordable fiber broadband access to 4,170 locals in Lamoille County. Eight months later and locals say network construction is finally getting underway.

According to the Lamoille County News And Citizen, Consolidated trucks have started to appear in towns like Stowe, Johnson, Eden, Cambridge, Belvidere and Waterville as Phase 1 of the network build gets underway.

Consolidated crews plan to deploy more than 400 miles of fiber this summer, providing locals with speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).

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“It’s been a Herculean effort for more than three years, so we’re all very excited to see the trucks rolling this summer,” Lamoille FiberNet Executive Director Lisa Birmingham told the outlet.

A new documentary, produced by the Vermont production company Well Told Films and the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB), tells the uplifting story of how community-minded Vermonters came together to solve a common challenge: the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity across the Green Mountain State.

“Connected: Vermont’s Grassroots Effort for Rural Broadband” recently premiered at the Capitol Theater in Montpelier, giving viewers a front-row seat at how hundreds of volunteers (and later state leaders) rallied around the emergence of Communications Union Districts (CUDs) as the state's primary vehicle to bring high-quality Internet service to every resident and business in one of the most rural states in the nation.

The 35-minute film brings to life the story of how a community-based solution to solving the digital divide in Vermont came to be, while showcasing all of the progress that's been made since ECFiber, the state's first CUD, was established in 2007.

It begins with the celebration of ECFiber completing its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network last year, an event at which U.S. Sen. Peter Welch succinctly summarized why the community broadband movement in Vermont was, and is, necessary:

"All this started with what at the time was really a radical idea – that if we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes to get us Internet, we'd be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren."

More cities and towns across the U.S. are exploring municipal broadband as an increasingly attractive and effective approach to bring ubiquitous, and affordable, high-speed Internet to its residents and businesses.

Now, a new handbook has been published that is tailored to guide local officials in navigating the logistical, technical, financial, and political challenges along the way.

Hot off the presses this week comes “Own Your Internet: How To Build A Public Broadband Network” – a project of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), published in partnership with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

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“This handbook is a key part of AAPB's strategy to double the number of public networks in the next five years, supporting communities in leveraging these networks for economic development, smart city initiatives, and attracting new residents," AAPB Executive Director Gigi Sohn said in announcing the handbook release.

Benton Executive Director Adrianne B. Furniss said the collaboration in publishing the guide made sense because “every community has a stake in this broadband moment—and they must have the tools they need to decide how they will meet their connectivity needs. We trust that this handbook is one of many tools communities will use to assess their situation and plan for a connected future.”

NEK Broadband continues to bring affordable fiber access to the long-neglected corners of the Green Mountain State. According to the latest update by NEK Broadband, a recently completed rollout has delivered affordable fiber access to 700 new addresses across multiple rural Vermont communities.

NEK Broadband is one of nine Communications Union Districts (CUDs) scattered across the state of Vermont. NEK Broadband alone represents 45 Vermont communities across Caledonia, Essex, Orleans and Lamoille Counties in the northeast part of the state (see the full list of communities here).

The CUD’s latest expansion plan primarily focused on bringing fiber access to parts of Danville, Kirby, Lyndon, St. Johnsbury, Walden and Wheelock, Vermont. With this latest expansion, NEK Broadband now provides fiber access to 2,100 predominantly rural Vermont residents in total, many of which only received broadband for the first time last year.

“We’re so pleased to end 2023 by giving more residents of the NEK access to high-speed internet,” Christa Shute, NEK Broadband’s Executive Director, said in a prepared statement. “We plan to bring even more residents online in early 2024.”

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The CUD currently provides upgraded users with access to speeds that exceed those provided by cable and DSL providers, even in many more urban markets.

NEK Broadband currently offers four tiers of broadband service: symmetrical 50 megabit per second (Mbps) service for $80 a month; symmetrical 250 Mbps service for $103 a month; symmetrical 500 Mbps service for $135 a month; and a symmetrical gigabit per second (Gbps) offering for $250 a month.

As the new year begins, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) announced today its latest tally of municipal broadband networks which shows a dramatic surge in the number of communities building publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure over the last three years.

Since January 1, 2021, at least 47 new municipal networks have come online with dozens of other projects still in the planning or pre-construction phase, which includes the possibility of building 40 new municipal networks in California alone.

Vermont’s nascent Communication Union Districts (CUD) are pioneering creative efforts to deploy affordable broadband to the rural parts of the Green Mountain State. That includes the Lamoille FiberNet CUD, which has greenlit a major new plan to expand affordable access to fiber in the most neglected parts of rural Vermont.

At an Aug. 14th meeting, the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) approved Lamoille FiberNet’s $1.3 million pre-construction grant, followed by a mid-September approval of the CUD’s $13.6 million construction grant.

“This grant means that, by the end of 2024, we can bring high-speed internet to almost all the homes and businesses in our CUD that are unserved or underserved,” Lamoille FiberNet Communications CUD Chair Jeff Tilton said in a statement.

With the Lamoille CUD covering 10 towns in the north central part of the state (Belvidere, Cambridge, Eden, Elmore, Hyde Park, Johnson, Morristown, Stowe, Waterville and Wolcott), Lamoille plans to have Fidium Fiber and Consolidated Communications deploy and manage 630 miles of new fiber connecting more than 4,800 unserved and underserved Lamoille County homes and businesses. The network will be deployed in two phases.

It was a big week for ECFiber as Vermont’s first – and oldest – Communication Union District (CUD) celebrated lighting up the last hub of its 1,500 mile-network in White River Junction.

To mark the occasion of connecting the “golden patch cord” that will extend high-speed Internet service to eight more communities in the Upper Valley region, White River Junction’s VFW Hall was packed this past Tuesday with CUD officials, local and state leaders, enthusiastic residents, and U.S. Sen. Peter Welch. They were there to celebrate what ECFiber officials liken to “the Golden Spike moment tying the first transcontinental railroad together.”

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After a 30-piece band played marching tunes, ECFiber Chairman F.X. Flinn marched to the podium to describe the meaning of the moment.

"It’s come to fruition today with a lighting of the White River Junction hub," he said. "This is the last piece of the puzzle for the network we originally envisioned that would bring world-class broadband to every home and business in the 23 member towns that originally voted town meeting day 2008 to create ECFiber."

Sen. Welch, an ECFiber subscriber who also spoke at the event, credited the state’s community broadband approach as the linchpin to solving the state’s digital divide:

“If we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes and get us Internet, we’d be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren. It wasn’t going to happen.”

Eight More Towns Join CUD 

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a $17.5 million grant to NEK Community Broadband (NEK Broadband), providing another shot in the arm for Vermont’s fast-growing collection of Communications Union Districts (CUDs). Such CUDs continue to play a starring role in Vermont’s efforts to finally conquer the digital divide.

NEK Broadband’s latest grant comes from the USDA’s ReConnect Loan & Grant Program, which helps defray the costs of network hardware and broadband deployment to rural and traditionally underserved U.S. markets.

The program this week doled out an additional $714 million in grants and loans to projects across 19 states.

NEK Broadband officials say its $17.5 million award will be combined with a $5.8 million investment to deliver affordable fiber access to 3,295 homes, 94 businesses, 183 farms and 11 educational facilities across 22 towns in Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex counties in Vermont.

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“For too long, large pockets of our state have been denied this critical resource because companies haven’t found it profitable enough to invest,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said in an announcement of NEK’s latest grant. “This federal funding is transformative, because the money is going directly to the very communities who will benefit, instead of having to go through those who care more about profits than delivering service.”