
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
In the City of Sherwood, a mostly residential bedroom community 16 miles south of Portland, officials have been quietly cultivating a digital vineyard across Oregon’s “Gateway to Wine Country.”
As part of its on-going work to build out a citywide fiber network, Sherwood Broadband recently secured a $9 million grant from the Oregon Broadband Office Broadband Deployment Program (BDP) to continue expanding Sherwood’s municipally-owned network into neighboring rural communities just outside city limits.
The grant award is part of $132 million in federal Rescue Plan funds the state is doling out to an array of community-owned broadband initiatives for 16 projects across 17 counties.
Award winners include Beacon Broadband, a subsidiary of the Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative ($19.4 million); Jefferson County ($19.2 million); Douglas Fast Net, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Douglas Electric Cooperative ($8.5 million); the Idaho-based member-owned cooperative Farmers Mutual Telephone Company, which offers broadband service in Malheur County, OR ($18.9 million); and a handful of independent providers like Blue Mountain Networks ($6.5 million) and Ziply Fiber ($10.2 million), recently acquired by Bell Canada.
The Boulder, Colorado city council has voted unanimously (9-0) in favor of striking a $9 million deal with Nebraska based ALLO Communications that should ultimately provide fast fiber access to most of the city’s 330,000 residents.
The particulars of the agreement involve ALLO leasing part of the city’s fiber network as part of a 20 year agreement. ALLO will pay Boulder a $1.5 million upfront lease payment and provide the city $2.25 per residential and $9 per business customer per month plus 1.5 percent of revenue from any wholesale lease. The total deal is estimated to be worth $9 million to the city.
“This achievement stems from a 2018 decision by the City Council to construct a citywide fiber backbone,” city officials said of the deal. “This forward-thinking initiative secured the city's future ability to support various broadband business models, ensuring long-term flexibility and growth in digital infrastructure.”
As per the deal, ALLO will provide broadband service to 80 percent of the city by 2028 and 97 percent of the city by 2030.
ALLO currently provides broadband access to more than 1.2 million customers throughout Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, and Missouri.
In deployed markets, ALLO offers locals two tiers of fiber service: symmetrical one gigabit per second (1 Gbps) for $98 a month, and symmetrical 2.3 Gbps service for $126 a month.
Here at ILSR we’re no stranger to telecom monopoly-backed efforts to mislead the public about the significant benefits of community owned broadband access.
That’s why a new “study” by the industry-backed Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) maligning municipal broadband doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
The study professes to take a look at a very small number of municipal broadband networks, then makes sweeping and patently false claims about the entire sector.
“In most cases, local governments have neither the competence nor the economies of scale to deliver broadband as well as private ISPs,” the study concludes. “So, favoring government-owned networks wastes societal resources, creates unfair competition, and is frequently unsustainable in the long run.”
There’s numerous problems here. One being that the survey only looked at 20 municipal broadband networks in a country where more than 450 community broadband networks – serving close to 800 different communities – now pepper the American landscape.
The study author acknowledges the study’s sample size was “too small for the data to represent all U.S. [government-owned broadband networks] reliably,” then proceeds to make broad sweeping assumptions unsupported by any actual evidence.
Placerville, California will soon be a place with a municipally-owned open-access fiber network as the city of 10,000 looks to provide its residents and businesses with local choice and more affordable broadband service.
The years-long effort was launched after frustration with what the city’s 2021 Broadband Master Plan described as the “equivalent of an ISP (Comcast) Monopoly.”
“Because of this,” the plan noted, “residents and businesses in Placerville are exposed to the common limitations of monopolies” – a high-priced reality that prompted 98 percent of city survey respondents to say “yes” to a municipally-owned network.
Now, three years after that report was published – and thanks to a $20.1 million award from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Last Mile Federal Funding Account (FFA) grant program – a city that was once nicknamed “Hangtown” is now set to cut the noose of the ISP monopoly.
Montgomery County Maryland has been awarded the “Best Municipal or Public Connectivity Program,” honored as a 2024 Broadband Nation Award winner for its ongoing efforts to expand affordable broadband access and help bridge the digital divide.
Montgomery County has worked extensively for years to connect municipal services and key anchor institutions, but more recently has begun leveraging that infrastructure to expand access to the most vulnerable. The county’s efforts have two key components:
FiberNet is a 650-mile municipal fiber communication network that provides broadband services to 558 County, State, municipal, educational, and anchor institutions.
MoCoNet is the County’s residential broadband network that provides free 300/300 megabit per second (Mbps) Internet service for residents at affordable housing locations. Originally providing a symmetrical 100 Mbps service, the network was recently upgraded to 300 Mbps, and is currently available to low-income housing communities.
Montgomery Connects Program Director Mitsuko Herrera tells ILSR that the county just received a $10 million grant from the State of Maryland to expand FiberNet and MoCoNet’s free 300 Mbps offering to 1,547 low-income and affordable housing units at seven properties operated by the County’s Housing Opportunities Commission.
The county’s also in the middle of upgrading its core fiber infrastructure to deliver significantly faster overall speeds.
Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the District is poised to use $61.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to “support the construction of community facilities” and expand affordable broadband to underserved communities.
Though details are scant, according to the District’s announcement, the funding received from the Treasury Department will be used to drive improvements for the District’s Southeast Library, the Shaw Library, Library Community Business Centers, the Anacostia Recreation Center, and the Ward 8 Senior Wellness Center. District leaders say they’re also eyeing as-yet-undefined improvements to affordable broadband access across the city of 689,000.
Rescue Plan recipients are facing an end-of-year deadline to both budget and obligate (contract) the federal funding for use or risk losing the funds entirely.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is making progress across the country to ensure Americans have access to the services and facilities that help them lead healthy lives and access economic opportunity,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said of the funding.
“These resources will deliver critical upgrades at community facilities for residents, particularly students and seniors, that provide essential services like high-speed Internet, financial literacy, and early learning opportunities.”
After two years enmeshed in the unglamorous work of coalition-building, speed test data collection, and pushing state leaders to invest in better telecommunication infrastructure across Oakland’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, digital equity advocates in the East Bay city are finally seeing the fruits of their labor pay off.
The city was recently awarded a $15 million grant from the state’s $2 billion dollar Federal Funding Account, administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The grant will fund the construction of a city-owned, open-access, hybrid middle mile/last mile fiber network – one of a half-dozen grant awards the CPUC approved in the first round of funding, most of which went to support community broadband initiatives.
Courtesy of federal Rescue Plan dollars, the infusion of cash will allow the city to deploy nearly 13 miles of new middle mile 144-count fiber, upgrade almost 12 miles of existing city-owned fiber, and add 9 miles of new last mile fiber connections. As the city’s network is built, it will be connected to the state’s new massive open access middle mile network now under construction.
The FFA grants are part of California’s larger Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at seeding competition and expanding broadband access across the Golden State.
The Oakland project not only paves the way for the city to connect 14 community anchor institutions (CAIs) and nine public safety buildings, it will also expand high-speed Internet access to thousands of unserved and underserved addresses in West and East Oakland.
Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s (CVEC) Firefly Broadband subsidiary has been awarded a new $12.2 million grant from the state of Virginia. The award will help fund a major update to an already massive effort to extend affordable broadband to vast swaths of rural Virginia.
According to a cooperative announcement, the $12.2 million in Virginia Telecommunication Initiative (VATI) grant funding will be used to help fund a broader $48.6 million partnership with Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, Dominion Energy, and county governments.
These current VATI funds were largely made possible by federal COVID relief legislation passed in 2021. Such ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding saw fewer overall restrictions and greater flexibility than infrastructure bill funding (BEAD) authorized the same year, resulting in states more quickly doling out funding for emerging broadband deployments.
“The fiber construction project will span approximately two years, covering 603 miles and reaching nearly 6,000 additional eligible locations in the counties of Amherst, Appomattox, Buckingham, Campbell, Fluvanna, Goochland, Greene, Louisa, Madison, and Powhatan,” CVEC said of the plan.
CVEC and Firefly’s expansion into unserved Virginia comes after the cooperative first finished an ambitious, $130 million plan to install over 4,500 miles of fiber-optic cable across 14 counties, providing broadband internet access to all of its 39,000 members.
Consumer Reports’ latest survey of the most popular ISPs in America is once again dominated by smaller providers and community-owned and operated broadband networks.
The magazine’s semi-paywalled report measured the opinions of 48,000 readers on a 100 point scale across four criteria: value for money, connection reliability, customer service, and speed.
The top ranked (95 points) ISP in the nation according to Consumer Reports was Greenlight, a small fiber operator that deploys largely around upstate New York. The second (92) was EPB, the community-owned fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee whose deployment has helped the city envision an estimated $2.69 billion return on its initial investment.
At the same time, regional monopolies that benefit from muted competition and oversight continued to fare poorly in the magazine’s rankings.
Expensive and usage-capped satellite broadband services fared the worst (HughesNet (14) and Viasat (14)), followed by a peppering of regional cable and telco monopolies like Comcast Xfinity (28), CenturyLink/Lumen (25), Mediacom’s Xtream (25), or Altice’s Optimum (20).
Join us Wednesday, July 31st at 3pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell and Travis Carter will be joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) along with special guest Case Lide (Keller and Heckman) to talk about T-Mobile buying Metronet, USF being cancelled by the Fifth Circuit, free municipal fiber in North Kansas City, Charter and Comcast losing more subscribers, and more.
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