Officials in the South Texas town of Harlingen say they’ve put their plan to deploy a municipal broadband network on hold after projected costs ballooned well beyond original estimates.

Originally, Harlingen officials had hoped to construct a $4 million fiber network to shore up broadband access to the city’s unserved and under-served populace, using a portion of the city’s $22 million share of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

But a $100,000 study conducted by Houston-based consultants Cobb Fendley and Associates suggested a more realistic price tag would be closer to $10 million, forcing city officials to reconsider their plan.

"We were hoping to get it rolling but we ran into a few hurdles along the way," City Commissioner Ford Kinsley recently told GovTech. "We're looking for some sources other than what we originally thought."

A 2019 census survey found that nearly 35 percent of Harlingen’s households (7,887 of 22,901) lacked any broadband access whatsoever, positioning the city as second worst in the state behind Pharr, Texas, which recently built a municipal fiber network to bring affordable connectivity to its city residents. Harlingen school district officials also say they found that 900 students' homes lacked Internet access as of 2020, hampering city education standards.

Image

The majority of the rest of the city’s residents are served by one or two providers, resulting in spotty access, high prices, and sluggish speeds. As with so many U.S. markets, the Covid home education and telecommuting boom drove home the need for the kind of affordable, uniform broadband access regional monopolies long failed to deliver.

In the Salt Lake City suburb some call “the garden spot of Utah,” Bountiful, Utah officials have settled on a plan to bring Bountiful Fiber and affordable connectivity to its residents and businesses.

By unanimous vote of the city council, the issuance of $48 million in bonds was authorized on May 26 to fund construction of what will be a city-owned open access fiber network.

The city will own the network and lease it out to multiple private Internet service providers (ISPs) – a model that city manager Gary Hill described as a way to create “a competitive marketplace for Internet service providers."

In a letter to city councilors before the bond issuance was authorized, Hill wrote: "Resident requests and sentiment ... demonstrate a need for city involvement to provide adequate, competitive, reliable broadband services.”

After issuing an RFP in November of last year, the city contracted with the nation’s largest open access network – UTOPIA Fiber – to build, operate, and maintain the network. It is expected that construction will take about 2 to 3 years to complete, though some subscribers will likely be lit up for service within 18 months of the start of construction, scheduled to begin this month.

Dark Money Looks to Torpedo Project

A dark money campaign spearheaded by the Utah Taxpayers Association (UTA), however, is threatening to derail the project. The group, whose annual conference is sponsored by Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen, is backing a “Gather Utah” initiative to obtain signatures for a petition that would stop the city from building the network.

Allegan County, Michigan will soon receive a $30 million state grant to finalize the deployment of a new open access, carrier-neutral fiber network. The end result will bring overdue competition – and affordable multi-gigabit fiber access – to long neglected communities by 2025.

The $30 million award is part of Michigan’s $238 million Realizing Opportunity with Broadband Infrastructure Networks (ROBIN) grant program, made possible by 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the resulting Capital Projects Fund.

123NET was chosen by Allegan County in late 2021 to help spearhead the Allegan County Broadband Project. The public-private partnership will bring access to more than 10,000 Allegan County residents either underserved or completely unserved by regional telecom giants, spread out across 1,000 square miles.

123NET and Allegan County had already committed to contributing $17.5 million for the construction of the network, with the county’s share coming from earlier ARPA awards.

Image

"We are pleased to be selected as a recipient of the Michigan ROBIN Grant Funding. This recognition validates the hard work and dedication that both we and Allegan County have put into this Project,” Dan Irvin, CEO of 123NET said of the award. “We look forward to partnering with additional communities throughout Michigan in a combined effort to make this state the best connected on the planet."

Colorado Springs, Colorado and its city-owned utility have begun construction on the second phase of a promising open access fiber optic network that should bring affordable fiber broadband to the city of half a million residents.

Construction of the network by Springs Utilities began in the first region in September 2022, shortly after the city-owned utility struck a 25-year lease agreement with Ting to be the network anchor tenant. Once completed, the network aims to deliver multi-gigabit service to roughly 200,000 homes, businesses, and city anchor institutions.

Local residents can pre-order service via the Ting website, but the company has yet to announce pricing or service tiers for its Colorado Springs deployment.

Brian Wortinger, Manager of fiber optics and telecommunications for Springs Utilities, told ILSR that the first phase of deployment passed 21,000 homes in the first fiber hut reason.

“Take rate is not a consideration for us, as we will lease 100 percent of the addresses to our anchor tenant, Ting Internet,” Wortinger said when asked about subscriber interest. “Their degree of success in obtaining customers has no impact on the revenues that we will generate through our dark fiber lease with them or any other tenant.”

The first phase of the network construction began in September of 2022, resulting in 225 new fiber route miles between I-25 and North Powers Boulevard. The second phase of the deployment began in June, and is focusing on the Rockrimmon neighborhood in Northwest Colorado Springs across I-25.

Image

Overall, project managers say they are only slightly behind their original projected schedule.

Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC) has begun construction on an ambitious new fiber deployment that will soon bring affordable, multi-gigabit fiber access to all of the cooperative’s existing electrical customers in rural Northern Florida.

Cooperative officials tell ILSR its three-phase build out is well underway, with a beta anticipated this summer and the first commercial customers connected by August. SVEC Communications Director Jon Little says the cooperative’s goal remains to deliver affordable fiber to all 20,000 of the cooperative's current electric customers by the end of 2026.

“We’ve broken our territory into three phases based partly on population or possible customers,” Little said.

The cooperative’s recently created subsidiary, Rapid Fiber Internet, will interface directly with subscribers, while Conexon manages deployment of more than 4,100 miles of fiber. Electrical users won’t see price hikes; the projected $93 million deployment cost will be funded by a combination of grants and loans paid back exclusively through user subscriptions.

Image

Little told ISLR that make ready (preparing utility poles for fiber attachments) prep and engineering for phase one are complete, and make ready construction for phase one is roughly 40 percent complete. He added that primary fiber construction for phase one is roughly twenty percent complete.

“We’re hoping that we will have a group of beta customers starting next month,” Little said. “We want to go about a month to get their feedback, and so we’re still hoping sometime in August to offer hookups to our members on that first feeder.”

Sometimes local coalitions can beat Goliath.

In July of 2022, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and several state lawmakers visited Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish to announce the community had secured a $4 million grant to build a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network in one of the most poorly connected parts of the state.

But, as we first reported here, the monopoly cable provider Sparklight (formerly known as Cable One) filed a challenge to the grant claiming the cable company already serves 2,856 homes there. Following Sparklight’s multi-state campaign to prevent competition in areas where the company operates, the challenge brought the project to a grinding halt, sparking Delta Interfaith to leap into action. With the help of allied organizations, the coalition was able to secure a major victory for community broadband in rural Louisiana.

Image

The Power of Community-based Coalitions

Inspired by Ammon, Idaho’s heralded open-access fiber network, the city of Eagle, located in the southwestern part of the state and home to 32,000 residents, is now soaring ahead with building its own open-access fiber network to connect city facilities and bring quality broadband to residents and businesses.

Eagle’s low density makes it expensive to connect, and as a result, the city has suffered from a lack of investment from private broadband providers. This has left residents – many of whom work from home or homeschool their children – with limited and antiquated options. But Eagle Mayor Jason Pierce wasn’t ready to hand over the city’s connectivity future to the big incumbents.

He explained to ILSR how Ammon’s “successful model” was the inspiration for Eagle and other cities across the Gem State to embark on a mission to provide city-wide connectivity and competition in areas underserved by the big incumbents.

“Cities were using [American Rescue Plan Act] ARPA dollars to help supplement […] private companies. We didn’t think that was the proper way to [go]. Federal dollars are the people’s money, they should own whatever we use it for. We need to be going after [public funding] to get [our residents’] tax dollars back into our communities.”

The open access network will give small local providers a chance to go into areas that it would not have previously made financial sense for them to serve. With the infrastructure already in place though, these companies will be able to enter the market and offer competition.

Longmont, Colorado’s NextLight community fiber network isn’t just delivering fast and affordable fiber access to locals, it’s consistently winning awards nationwide.

The city-owned network has topped PC Magazine’s Readers’ Choice rankings, which asked readers to rate their satisfaction with their residential broadband providers. Nextlight was also rated as the top gaming ISP of 2023, and was rated the fastest ISP in the nation in 2018 and the second fastest ISP by the magazine last year.

The city was also rated the 17th best work-at-home city in another 2022 survey. This latest survey asked magazine readers to assess ISP satisfaction based on speed, reliability and value. NextLight excelled at all three.

“NextLight's near-perfect scores, including an astronomic 9.9 for overall satisfaction, are unprecedented in the history of PCMag's surveys of ISPs,” the magazine noted. “The company's lowest score is for setup, and yet that number is still higher than almost any other rating earned by another ISP in any category.”

As California aims to boost broadband competition and Los Angeles County pursues what could be the biggest municipal broadband network ever built, local activists say they’ve made some meaningful recent inroads on both improving broadband mapping, and regulatory reform that should aid the equitable deployment of modern, affordable access.

Recently, inroads have been made on fixing long-broken California cable franchise law. In the early aughts, cablecos (and telcos pushing into the TV business) successfully lobbied for state-level “cable franchise reform” laws they promised would dramatically lower prices. In reality, such bills were often little more than legislative wishlists crafted by telecom giants.

Often these state-level replacements for local franchise agreements eroded legal regulatory authority, eliminated long standing requirements for uniform broadband and TV deployment, and in some states–like Wisconsin–even acted to strip away local consumer protections and eminent domain rights. Warnings by academics on this front were widely ignored.

Seventeen years after its passage, California activists say that California’s 2006 Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act (DIVCA) was no exception.