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.

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“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.

New York’s Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP) continues to provide grant funds to build municipal broadband networks across the state, as state broadband officials recently announced the program’s largest round of funding to date.

As we reported in June, the MIP program – specifically designed to fund municipally-owned networks as part of the Empire State’s $1 billion ConnectALL initiative – awarded $70 million to a half dozen projects earlier this summer.

Then, earlier this month, another $140 million in grant awards were announced for an additional six projects, promising to deliver “more than 1,200 miles of publicly-owned fiber optic infrastructure and wireless hubs, connecting (passing) over 60,000 homes and businesses with affordable, symmetric service – offering equal download and upload speeds at rates below regional averages.”

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The funding will be used to expand broadband infrastructure (and seed competition) in the Central New York, Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley, North Country, Mid-Hudson and Western New York regions.

In a prepared press statement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul characterized the grants as “a transformative step forward in our mission to connect every New Yorker to affordable, high-speed Internet.”

Canada’s biggest telecom giant has acquired Ziply Fiber – and a sizable swath of municipal operation agreements for open access fiber scattered across the Pacific Northwest. Bell Canada and Ziply’s joint announcement indicates that the full deal will be around $5 billion Canadian, plus an additional $2 billion in acquired debt.

The acquisition could help accelerate Ziply’s planned expansion across the Pacific Northwest, where the company’s fiber network currently passes 1.3 million locations across Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State.

At the same time, Bell Canada’s history of anti-competitive behavior could herald a culture shift at the ascending provider. Ziply and Bell Canada’s rapid-fire acquisition of smaller providers across the Pacific Northwest could also risk undermining the pro-competitive benefits of the kind of open access policies Ziply previously embraced.

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Ziply was formed when WaveDivision Capital purchased Frontier Communications’ Pacific Northwest operations in 2020. It has quickly become a major player across the four states thanks in part to numerous public private partnerships with municipalities, and a 2022 announcement of $450 million in new private sector funding.

There’s signs of life for a municipal fiber project long considered in Fort Dodge, Iowa, after the Fort Dodge City Council moved forward with plans to use a surplus in the city’s sewer maintenance budget to pay for the higher than expected cost of the city’s fiber network.

In 2019, a broadband utility was a top-rated need in the city’s strategic plan, and residents voted that November to grant the city the authority to start building a municipal telecommunications network. The network has since steadily expanded in the city of 24,591 residents.

“We currently are just short of 2,400 customers, with a goal of having 2,500 customers by January 1, 2025,” Fort Dodge Fiber Director Jeremy Pearson tells ILSR. “If everything works out, we should exceed that goal. If you’ve got any pull with Mother Nature, we would appreciate any help to keep the temperatures warm and the snow away!”

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In 2021, the city borrowed $33.3 million to pay for building the fiber optic utility with a loan to be paid off with revenue generated by Fort Dodge Fiber as the project expanded. The city promised locals the planned network wouldn’t result in an increase in local resident property taxes.

But thanks to inflation and increasing labor and material costs, that $33.3 million isn’t going to be enough to finish the project. So last September the city council voted to provide a $3.1 million loan from the city’s sewer fund to Fort Dodge Fiber.

The loan has a 5.25 percent interest rate and is expected to be paid back sometime in 2026 or 2027, according to local news outlets.

Though Northampton, Massachusetts residents still broadly support the construction of a city-owned municipal fiber broadband network, city officials are celebrating the arrival of Gateway Fiber, which will soon be delivering a more affordable fiber option, and more broadband competition, to the traditionally underserved city.

Gateway Fiber recently unveiled plans to deliver multi-gigabit speeds to large swaths of the city. The company, which will finance the entirety of the build, says it’s already invested $3 million in the project so far.

It’s a welcome arrival for a city that’s been frustrated by substandard service provided by regional telecom monopolies, and flirting with the idea of its own municipal broadband network for the better part of the last decade. Some of the city’s efforts on this front have made it easier for providers like Gateway to serve the city of 29,000.

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“While we don’t have a final cost estimate for the project, it will be a multi-million-dollar investment that will benefit both residents and small businesses in the Northampton area,” Gateway Fiber representative David Workman tells ILSR. “The project is 100 percent funded by Gateway Fiber, and we are also exploring grant opportunities that can be used to address digital equity.”

A ceremonial ribbon cutting ceremony for the project was held in late September. The multi-phase construction (4,000 locations passed in phase one, 5,000 locations passed in phase two) is expected to extend well into 2025.

Lafayette Utilities System’s LUS Fiber subsidiary is taking the show on the road. Louisiana’s only publicly-owned broadband provider says it’s expanding access into nearby Church Point, bringing affordable fiber access to the town of nearly 4,200 residents.

LUS Fiber was awarded a $21 million grant to expand fiber outside of Lafayette as part of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP).

“This expansion not only improves the lives of our residents but also enhances opportunities for businesses, education, and healthcare in our town,” Church Point Mayor Ryan ‘Spanky’ Meche said in a prepared statement. “LUS Fiber’s work here is a tremendous step forward for our community.”

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The expansion is part of a series of new broadband deployments that should bring more than one million feet of new fiber options to numerous new Louisiana communities, including Ville Platte, Venice, Mamou, and Basile. Church Point residents are currently able to start scheduling installations via the LUS Fiber website.

The deployments technically began earlier this year, starting with Ville Platte, which data indicates, currently has the fifth-slowest average broadband speeds in the continental U.S.

Like most of America, much of Louisiana is dominated by a handful of regional telecom monopolies that see little competitive incentive to compete on speeds, coverage, prices, or quality customer service.

California’s $2 billion Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program (FFA) has announced another $207 million in new broadband grants across Amador, Los Angeles, and Solano Counties.

The FFA program, part of a broader $6 billion California “Broadband For All” initiative, is aimed at boosting broadband competition and driving down costs statewide.

According to the state’s announcement, $61 million in new grants were awarded by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for five Last Mile FFA broadband infrastructure grant projects in Amador and Solano Counties, bringing affordable fiber Internet access to approximately 10,000 Californians.

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The CPUC award details indicate that the grants will be awarded to the Golden State Connect Authority (GSCA) and the City of Vallejo to help bring fiber access to 2,278 unserved locations in Amador and Solano counties.

The City of Vallejo will leverage $3.8 million in state grants to complete four different projects laying predominantly underground fiber, with the city retaining ownership of the finished network and Smart Fiber Networks providing last mile consumer-facing service.

The Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas say they recently finished delivering fiber broadband capability to more than one million Arkansans as part of a $4.66 billion expansion.

More than 40,000 miles of fiber have been installed by 17 cooperative broadband providers, including 15 local broadband providers, one wholesale broadband provider, and one middle-mile fiber company.

In a prepared statement, Arkansas cooperatives indicate they have $2.2 billion in additional projects lined up connecting an additional 13,000 residents in the “Natural State.” Once completed, Arkansas cooperatives will have deployed 53,000 miles of fiber and connected 1.2 million state residents to fiber.

Informed by their efforts at rural electrification nearly a century earlier, U.S. electrical cooperatives have increasingly been pushing into fiber broadband deployment. Initially as a way to better monitor and manage complex modern electrical grids, then ultimately as a way to extend access to predominately rural customers trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Nearly 80 percent of the state cooperatives’ investment in fiber infrastructure has been self-funded without grant subsidies, the coalition notes. Many of the markets they’ve targeted have long been neglected by regional cable and phone giants that believe the investment into rural counties isn’t worth the time and resources, or won’t be profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street.  

Now that the election has been settled, many in the broadband space are wondering what, if anything, will change with the incoming Trump administration.

Of course no one has a crystal ball, but there are a number of telecommunication policy developments we will be tracking, which include numerous fronts where there will likely be changes.

What those changes will be exactly will only become apparent sometime next year.

BEAD and DEA

The BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment) program and Digital Equity Act (DEA) programs are at the center of the universe in the national effort to ensure everyone has high-speed access to the Internet.

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However, in the run-up to the election, GOP leaders were highly critical of the BEAD program, saying it was taking too long to dispense funds to build new networks, questioned the NTIA favoring the building of fiber networks, and criticized aspects of the effort they consider to be a waste of taxpayer dollars.

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.