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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
$25 Million Lamoille County, Vermont Fiber Build Gets Underway
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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.
It’s a snapshot of the latest developments with one of the state’s 10 CUDs – something we examined in detail in a recently published study on how Vermont is supercharging its telecommunications infrastructure efforts to reach the unconnected by putting its weight behind community broadband-driven efforts. The report – Neighborly Networks: Vermont's Approach to Community Broadband [pdf] – traces the emergence of a unique public-public partnership arrangement that first appeared in the Green Mountain State in 2008.
In Lamoille County, many locals are not only getting fiber for the first time ever, they’re getting it at price points that are comparable if not lower than in many major metro markets. Consolidated broadband services are being sold and marketed to consumers under the Fidium Fiber brand.
Fidium currently offers residential customers symmetrical 50 Mbps (megabit per second) service for $35 a month ($55 after first year); symmetrical 250 Mbps service for $60 a month ($85 after the first year); symmetrical 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) service for $55 the first year, $65 the second year and $95 after that; and a symmetrical 2 Gbps tier for $75 a month the first year, $85 the second year, and $95 a month after that.
The company’s service tiers do not feature long-term contracts or usage caps.
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Network construction will occur in two major phases. Phase 1 will cover the deployment of 550 miles of fiber, connecting 4,170 addresses by the end of 2024. Phase 2 will finish the job of reaching any remaining unserved customers, and should be completed in 2025. Consolidated is expected to invest $10 million in the network, while the Lamoille FiberNet CUD will invest $14.9 million.
“Lamoille FiberNet will own certain fiber assets–in all ten towns–funded with grant dollars but not the entire network per se,” Birmingham told ILSR in an interview last year.
Vermont state broadband leaders have embraced CUDs as the primary avenue to bridge the state’s long standing digital divide. That effort began in earnest back in 2015, when the state passed a new law allowing two or more towns to form CUDs. Under that law, CUDs can raise funds for broadband through grants, debt and donations–but not through taxes.
Since then, CUDs have played a starring role in bringing affordable fiber to neighborhoods long left forgotten on the wrong side of the digital divide.
A large portion of Vermont’s $150 million 2021 broadband package is being funneled toward CUDs in a state where 85 percent of municipalities and 90 percent of underserved locations fall within a CUD. CUDs are also poised to receive a notable chunk of the $229 million in BEAD (Broadband Equity And Deployment) funding included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.
Inline image of downtown Morrisville, VT courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Attribution 3.0 Unported
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