The City of Centennial, Colorado is making steady inroads bringing affordable fiber Internet service to the city of 106,000, leveraging its city-owned fiber backbone and a partnership with the Charlottesville, VA.-based fiber provider Ting.

Just south of Denver – in a city known for its high-tech industry, craft breweries, and family-friendly neighborhoods – voter-approved efforts to get out from under the thumb of regional monopolies has driven a surge of competition, most recently exemplified by Ting’s continued delivery of affordable gigabit fiber.

Ting Public Affairs manager Deb Walker told ISLR that while the company couldn’t break out specific details on the number of passed fiber locations in the Centennial market, they’re making inroads on fiber deployments across Colorado.

“Now that Ting has city-wide networks built or under construction in three markets in the Denver region (Centennial, Greenwood Village and Thornton), and they share certain operational resources, we report progress on those markets together in our quarterly Ting Build Scorecard,” Walker said.

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“At the end of the first quarter of 2024, we had almost 31,000 serviceable addresses in the region, mostly in Centennial as we’re just starting the other two markets,” she added.

In 2021 Ting also unveiled the construction of a new 16,000 square foot office complex and data center, Walker said. Ting is also collaborating with Colorado Springs Utilities, which is building a fiber network throughout the city and connecting local homes and businesses.

State broadband officials in Massachusetts have announced over $45 million in grant awards from the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Gap Networks Program with the lion’s share going to Verizon to “expand high-speed broadband [I]nternet infrastructure to underserved homes, business, and community anchor institutions across the state.”

State broadband officials say the $45.4 million in grant awards will be coupled with $40 million in matching funds from the awardees to expand broadband access to approximately 2,000 locations in 41 Massachusetts communities.

In 2022, as we previously reported here, Massachusetts was allocated a total of $145 million in federal Rescue Plan dollars to fund the Bay State program. With the state’s first round of funding from the Gap Networks Program awarding $45 million to four applicants, about $100 million is left in the pot for future funding rounds. Massachusetts has yet to receive its $147 million share of federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, the spending rules for which are much more stringent than the more flexible CPF funding rules.

Recent federal government efforts to expand use of public Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum could be of significant help to municipalities and local communities looking to bridge the digital divide with the increasingly popular wireless technology.

CBRS spectrum refers to 150 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. In 2015, the FCC adopted rules for shared commercial use of the band, creating a three-tiered structure to avoid interference with military radar during collaborative use of the spectrum.

For municipalities, the spectrum has already proven to be a valuable way to deploy wireless access to the public. In Syracuse, New York, the city last fall launched a new public wireless network on the back of CRBS. In Longmont, Colorado, the St. Vrain Valley School District used CBRS to build a private LTE network connecting 4,000 students in partnership with NextLight, which operates Longmont's city-owned municipal fiber network.

Not all community deployments of CRBS have delivered satisfactory results for municipalities, however. The STEM Alliance in Westchester County, New York retired their efforts to deploy a CBRS network in Yonkers after they struggled with urban capacity constraints and low usage.

As the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is now bankrupt and no longer helping low-income households pay for home Internet service, the City of San Francisco is being honored with the 2024 Community Broadband Project of the Year Award by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) for its Fiber to Housing (FTH) program.

Built on the back of the city’s municipally-owned fiber optic network – which since 2002 has been used to connect city and public safety facilities, hospitals, libraries and street lights – California’s fourth most populous city is well on its way to extending the city-owned network to deliver free high-speed Internet service to 30,000 affordable housing units across the city.

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The program currently serves over 14,300 affordable housing units in the city, as well as 1,500 beds at homeless shelters across 115 sites, city officials say. An additional 10,000 residential units are expected to be connected in the coming fiscal year, with the aim of serving 30,000 units by July 2025.

According to the city’s website, the program has connected 52 public housing locations across the city to “fiber-optic and Ethernet cabling in every housing unit.” An additional 63 housing locations are getting free Internet through onsite Wi-Fi with download speeds ranging from 60 to 120 Mbps (Megabits per second), which exceeds the 50 Mbps service Comcast’s Internet Essentials offers.

The towns of Somerville and Washington Maine have kickstarted their long-percolating efforts to deliver fiber broadband to both long-neglected rural municipalities.

In an update posted to both towns' respective websites, officials say that the municipalities’ partner, Axiom Technologies, has begun construction on a dual-town fiber deployment funded by state and federal grants.

Somerville (est. pop. 600) and Washington (est. pop. 1,590) will be offering many local residents fiber access for the first time. Both of the deployments were made possible by a 2022 Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP) grant from the NTIA, coordinated via the ConnectMaine Authority (now part of the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA)).

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Established in 2021, the MCA is a quasi-governmental agency funded through a combination of federal and state resources, and tasked with ensuring the even, equitable deployment of broadband access to all corners of the Pine Tree State. They’ll be playing a central role in the disbursement of the state’s $272 million upcoming BEAD subsidy awards.

Fiber Finally  

According to a Washington, Maine FAQ, the total cost of network deployment for the town was $2,913,919 ($2,622,527 from the NTIA, $291,392 from the state). The Somerville FAQ indicates that their segment of the network construction was $1,601,901 ($1,441,711 from the NTIA, $160,190 from the state).

In March, Charter Communications tried (and failed) to include a poison bill in New York State’s budget bill that would have hamstrung community broadband. In stark contrast, a New York legislator this month introduced new legislation he says would make it easier than ever for New York state municipal broadband projects to thrive.

State Senator Jeremy Cooney of Rochester has introduced the Broadband Deployment Assistance Act of 2024 (S9134), which would streamline the permitting process for municipal broadband projects by "amending the general municipal law, in relation to requiring substantially similar permits for broadband deployment to be processed together at the same time and on an expedited basis."

“With a quicker timeline and more efficient process for local governments, we can create affordable options for New Yorkers that empower them to take control of their digital destiny,” Cooney wrote in an editorial published at Syracuse.com.

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Cooney says he was motivated by a lack of broadband competition in New York State. New York is dominated by Charter Communications, which was almost kicked out of the state in 2019 for poor service and  misleading regulators about broadband deployment conditions affixed to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable.

Vermont’s Communications Union Districts (CUDs), which were the subject of a recently released ILSR report, continue to make steady inroads in delivering high-quality broadband access to long-neglected rural Vermont residents.

That includes locally owned not-for-profit municipal operation Maple Broadband, which has completed the first phase of its broadband network and is busy on an expansion.

Maple Broadband is technically an extension of the Addison County Communications Union District (ACCUD), a coalition of 20 different member towns working collaboratively to bring gigabit-capable fiber to residents long left unserved or underserved by regional telecom giants.

In September of 2021 Maple Broadband announced a public private partnership with Vermont-based Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom (WCVT), to build and operate a district-wide fiber network. The $30 million network is, in part, propped up by ARPA funds and a $9.1 million grant from the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB).

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Three years later and the CUD says it has completed the first phase of its network; laying 143.5 miles of fiber and passing 1,647 homes and businesses in portions of the Vermont towns of Cornwall, Orwell, Shoreham, Whiting, Salisbury, and Middlebury.

In the Show Me State – cradled in the center of the Ozarks – Houston, Missouri is the biggest small city in Texas County.

And what local officials have shown its 2,100 or so residents over the last four years is that it can build its own modern telecommunication infrastructure to help spark economic development and offer big city Internet connectivity at affordable rates.

It began with a citizen survey in 2019, asking residents if they would be interested in a municipal broadband service, given the inadequate offerings of the big incumbent providers. Since then – not only has the city built an 18-mile fiber ring for an institutional network (I-net) to connect the city’s facilities – it has built a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that now covers 95 percent of the 3.6 square-mile county seat.

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“The project started in 2020 and we went live in the spring of 2021,” Randon Brown, Technology Director for the City of Houston Fiber Department, tells ILSR. “Construction of the project has taken approximately four years. (Today) 95 percent of the town (network) is operational and can be serviced.”

The city has spent $3 million of its own money to fund construction of the aerial fiber network, Brown said.

The network passes 1,200 premises with 272 subscribers now getting service from Houston Fiber, “which encompasses a mixture of residential and business customers” – though that number will soon rise to 364 (30 percent take rate) in the near future as more residents and businesses are in the pipeline waiting to be connected, he added.

On a map, the Crenshaw District is a 2.9 square-mile neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, home to nearly 30,000 mostly black residents.

In the popular imagination, Crenshaw is the backdrop for the Oscar-nominated movie "Boyz In the Hood" – the real life neighborhood that cultivated the likes of former Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley; rappers-turned-actors Ice Cube and Ice T; and the late rapper/entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle.

But on the streets of Crenshaw, a transformative vision is unfolding – an initiative local leaders describe as “a reparative development project.”

The idea is to inspire and empower neighborhood residents with strategic investments rather than displace them through gentrification. The effort is being led by Destination Crenshaw, a nonprofit community organization established in 2017 to celebrate the history and culture of Black Los Angeles.

The most visible part of the vision is to create the largest Black public art project in the nation along Crenshaw Boulevard, the 1.3 mile spine of the neighborhood – or what Destination Crenshaw describes as an “open air museum” centered around “pocket parks” and a “comprehensive streetscape design” that will feature commissioned murals and sculptures from local Black artists.

As FCC Chair Jessica Ronsenworcel this week lamented the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), the next Building For Digital Equity event is ready to address the now-what question.

Slated for June 10 from 3 to 4:15 PM ET, the upcoming #B4DE will focus on “Pathways To Affordable Connectivity” and will serve up plenty of food-for-thought and actionable intel for those working in the trenches to bridge the digital divide.

While the event is free and will be livestreamed, attendees should register here in advance for full access.

Co-hosted by Pamela Rosales with the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and Christopher Mitchell – Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) – the agenda for the popular virtual gathering is now locked and loaded.

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It will begin with lightning round presentations that will each highlight the crucial importance of getting devices into the hands of those who have a hard time affording them, as well as those who don’t feel they have the digital skills necessary to use them.