North Carolina’s Roanoke Cooperative continues to make steady progress with expansion of its Fybe last mile fiber network within The Tar Heel State.

Cooperative officials tell ILSR that the cooperative and a coalition of organizations across North Carolina have major expansion plans in the works, starting with a fiber build in Halifax County, population 47,298.

Currently, Fybe provides fiber broadband service to around 6,000 subscribers in North Carolina, but thanks to an historic infusion of federal and state grants, the hope is to expand fiber access to the bulk of unserved addresses county-wide.

Fybe COO Bo Coughlin tells ILSR that the lion’s share of the cooperative's upcoming efforts to bring affordable connectivity to unserved and under-served portions of North Carolina will be under the banner of a coalition dubbed Encore, a nonprofit collaboration between MCNC, North Carolina Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMC), and Fybe.

“MCNC has been around for 40 years,” Coughlin notes. “It started as an economic Development institution funded by the state. Their goal was originally to help birth the microchip industry in RTP down in Raleigh, but today they provide transport to around a hundred universities, charter schools, and community anchor institutions across nearly 100 counties.”

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Back in April, Fybe won a $9 million Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grant to help bring fiber to the largely underserved, heavily-rural residents of Martin, Bertie, Halifax, and Hertford counties.

“So currently, we pass about 5,000 total homes across Northampton and Halifax,” Coughlin said of Fybe’s current footprint.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office has unveiled a new round of broadband grants that will expand fiber access to unserved homes and businesses across 23 Alabama counties. This latest round of grants should help fund 2,347 miles of new fiber deployment, bringing broadband availability to more than 15,000 locations scattered across the Yellowhammer state.

The funding – made largely possible by 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money that both of the state’s Senators voted against – comes on the heels of another $150 million broadband funding round announced back in February.

“With these latest grants, Alabama takes another all-important step to supplying high-speed Internet availability to more rural Alabama communities and neighborhoods,” Ivey said in a statement. “Upon completion of these projects, more children will have better learning opportunities, more businesses will have greater opportunities to compete worldwide, and emergency response departments and medical clinics will be able to offer improved services.”

Both funding rounds were heavily dominated by large private telecoms like AT&T, Charter, and Brightspeed. But the state has also been doling out some sizable awards to local cooperatives in a bid to shore up rural fiber access.

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.

Telecom monopolies have hoovered up the lion’s share of $214 million recently doled out by the Pennsylvania state Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP), with cooperatives, smaller ISPs, and community-owned networks left largely out in the cold.

It’s not a surprising move for a state long considered politically hostile to community-owned and operated broadband networks, though industry experts say this latest round of awards was particularly egregious when it comes to dodgy politics and its total lack of any real transparency.

According to an announcement by the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority (PBDA), this $204 million in Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP) grant awards will help fund 53 projects in 42 counties across Pennsylvania, connecting 40,000 homes and businesses, bringing high-speed Internet to over 100,000 Pennsylvanians.

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The awards were funded with the state’s Capital Projects Fund allocation. After matching funds by winning bidders are included, the total broadband investment is expected to exceed $407 million. A complete breakdown of all grant award winners can be found here.

Verizon was the biggest grant award winner, nabbing $78.3 million. Other big grant award winners were Comcast ($61.7 million), Windstream ($12 million) Frontier ($3.5 million) and Brightspeed ($782,000). A few small private ISPs also won awards including Adams Cable ($387,969) Upward Broadband ($1,476,288) and Alleghenies Broadband ($1,809,524).