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New Documentary Showcases Vermont's Unique Community Broadband Approach

A new documentary, produced by the Vermont production company Well Told Films and the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB), tells the uplifting story of how community-minded Vermonters came together to solve a common challenge: the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity across the Green Mountain State.

Connected: Vermont’s Grassroots Effort for Rural Broadband” recently premiered at the Capitol Theater in Montpelier, giving viewers a front-row seat at how hundreds of volunteers (and later state leaders) rallied around the emergence of Communications Union Districts (CUDs) as the state's primary vehicle to bring high-quality Internet service to every resident and business in one of the most rural states in the nation.

The 35-minute film brings to life the story of how a community-based solution to solving the digital divide in Vermont came to be, while showcasing all of the progress that's been made since ECFiber, the state's first CUD, was established in 2007.

It begins with the celebration of ECFiber completing its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network last year, an event at which U.S. Sen. Peter Welch succinctly summarized why the community broadband movement in Vermont was, and is, necessary:

"All this started with what at the time was really a radical idea – that if we in rural Vermont were going to depend on the big telecommunication companies to wire our homes to get us Internet, we'd be waiting until our grandchildren had grandchildren."

Rural Cooperative Hardy Telecommunications Does The Heavy Lifting In Unserved West Virginia

The rocky rural hills of West Virginia are a formidable foe when it comes to building high-speed Internet infrastructure that offers affordable high-quality service.

Nobody knows that better than Hardy Telecommunications (OneNet), a small community-owned cooperative that delivers affordable fiber to frustrated locals deemed too costly and cumbersome to be served by the incumbent telecom giants.

The cooperative serves parts of four counties (Hardy, Pendelton, Grant, and Hampshire). It connected its first fiber customer in 2013, after receiving $31.6 million in federal BTOP funding. Since then, the cooperative tells ILSR they’ve spent $20 million of their own funds to bring fiber to rural corners of the aptly-named Mountain State.

Derek Barr, Assistant General Manager at Hardy Telecommunications, says the cooperative currently delivers broadband service to 5,050 rural subscribers – 4,736 of which are on fiber lines that simply wouldn’t exist without federal funding programs. Hardy Telecommunications also provides 68 customers with fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband service.

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HardyNet service area map

“Our focus is fiber, and we're trying to build out fiber as much as we can,” Barr tells ILSR. “But it's very tough in our serving region. It's all mountains and a lot of trees, and a big chunk of our area is either state park or national forest land. It's also very hard to do fixed wireless because even if it might work in the winter, it's not going to work in the summer” when tree leaves block line of sight, he noted.

So the cooperative slowly and consistently expands fiber as it can, often in partnership with Pendleton County. As a result, locals have the option of a variety of double and triple play phone, cable, and fiber options, starting with a symmetrical 100 Mbps (megabit per second) downstream, 50 Mbps upstream fiber and phone bundle for $79 a month.

Burning Desire to Bring Affordable Fiber Service To Rural Washoe County, Nevada

Officials in Washoe County, Nevada have struck a new public private partnership (PPP) with Digital Technology Solutions (DTS) to deploy affordable fiber service into the long-neglected rural towns of Gerlach and Empire, Nevada. The deal is part of a broader effort to bring affordable access to underserved residents just out of reach of broadband access.

Behzad Zamanian, Washoe County Chief Information Officer, tells ILSR that the county’s two-phased project first involved contracting with DTS to construct and maintain a $2.3 million middle-mile fiber network that connected Gerlach to Reno, culminating in a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Gerlach Community Library last July.

“The reason [Gerlach] was identified as a high priority was that it was considered unserved or underserved; there was no presence of any of the major Internet service providers in that region,” he noted. “There was no high speed Internet available.”

Until last summer, area students and residents were completely cut off from online learning, employment services, remote health care, and other essential services and opportunities.

Expanding the middle mile network required close collaboration with the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, which allowed the county to piggyback on the tribe’s existing fiber runs from Reno to Nixon, Nevada. The county then worked closely with the Nevada Office of Science, Innovation, and Technology (OSIT) and DTS to deploy fiber the remaining 60 miles from Nixon to Gerlach.

One Year After Launch, Dryden, NY Muni Network Making Steady Progress

One year after launching a municipal fiber network, Dryden, NY officials say they’re making steady progress in their quest to expand affordable fiber broadband to the entire town of 14,500.

While the effort hasn’t been without obstacles, town leaders say the public response to their foray into broadband has been overwhelmingly positive.

“While there are challenges, we are continuing to make great progress in the buildout,” Dryden Town Supervisor Jason Leifer tells ILSR. “We have support from our residents, who continue to show interest in this project. We also have financial support from Tompkins County in the form of grants–and from neighboring municipalities who are interested in replicating our model.”

The city’s network began with a 50-home trial pilot trial in the southwest part of town. The broader $15 million network will be funded by a combination of bonds, $2 million in federal COVID-19 disaster relief funding, an Appalachian Regional Commission grant, and eventually, subscriber revenues.

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Dryden Fiber map

The town took a phased approach to deployment, first by connecting the backbone of the network in the southeast of the city, followed by a focus on the western and eastern halves of the municipality, respectively. The Dryden fiber website features a build map that helps locals track network progress.

“We have currently passed over 420 addresses with our buildout,” freshly-appointed Dryden Fiber Executive Director David Makar tells ISLR. “This includes over 150 rental properties – mostly single family homes and apartments – as well as many owner occupied homes and businesses. We are still in phase one, and as we move into the village of Dryden and the hamlets of Varna, Ellis Hollow, and Etna, we will be in phase two.”

Tribal Broadband Bootcamp Advances: Underground and Above

The Tribal Broadband Bootcamps (TBB) – a three-day intensive learning experience focused on building and running Tribal Internet networks – are becoming even more immersive as the 12th TBB is now underway at the homestead of TBB co-founder Matthew Rantanen.

As more Tribal nations build out their own broadband networks to deliver service to Indigenous communities in the most disconnected areas of North America, broadband-minded Tribal leaders and instructors continue to gather in different Tribal regions across the country several times a year for the ultimate Indian Country networking experience.

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TBB 11 Matt and Spencer

This time participants descended on “RantanenTown Ranch” in Aguanga, California – part of southern California’s Inland Empire region near Temecula.

With help from ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative Director and TBB co-founder Christopher Mitchell, and a handful of other instructors, the ranch has been transformed into a working demonstration site so participants could better learn the technologies involved in constructing broadband networks, while taking a deep-dive into what it takes to operate a network.

All of the previous bootcamps offered hands-on training. But, this particular bootcamp took it up a notch as TBB instructors set up a full deployment demonstration, illustrating how fiber is buried and/or deployed aerially.

Digging In

Edison, New Jersey Inches Forward On Municipal Broadband Plan

After years of planning, Edison, New Jersey officials are moving forward on a municipal fiber plan built on the back of a $2 million American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grant. While the funding was originally announced last summer by state leaders, city officials only just passed a resolution last week accepting the grant.

Edison residents have long complained of a local broadband monopoly at the hands of Optimum, resulting in spotty access, slow speeds, and high prices. While Edison wants to break the competitive logjam, the full cost and scope of Edison’s as-yet-unfinished plan remains unclear.

Edison spent $36,750 on a feasibility study in 2022 to determine the plausibility of building a citywide fiber network. The resulting study by Matrix Design Group found that 87 percent of Edison locals would likely switch to a city-owned and operated fiber network if the option existed.

"Ending Optimum’s monopoly in Edison is a high priority," Edison Mayor Sam Joshi wrote on Instagram and Facebook shortly after the study was published, calling it "a step towards internet freedom."

‘Scrappy’ Island Munis Lead Charge For Affordable Broadband In Maine

Peppered by winding country roads and remote islands, Maine exemplifies the challenges in even deployment of affordable broadband. But thanks to tenacious island communities and forward-thinking state leadership, a growing roster of community-owned broadband networks are leading the charge toward affordable access in the Pine Tree State.

Peggy Schaffer, former executive director of the state of Maine's broadband mapping and expansion effort, ConnectMaine, has played a starring role in shoring up Maine’s broadband mapping data after years of federal dysfunction.

Schaffer’s well versed in the broad array of challenges faced by remote Maine communities, and says she’s long been impressed by the “scrappy” nature of Maine’s community-owned island deployments, which have faced down and overcome no limit of onerous challenges in an  ongoing quest to finally bridge the state’s long standing digital divide.

Maine is currently ranked 49th in the U.S. in terms of resident access to gigabit-capable broadband service. Like so much of the country, the state is heavily dominated by regional monopolies that failed to uniformly deliver affordable, next-generation broadband, despite decades of federal subsidies, regulatory favors, and tax breaks.

Now local Maine communities are taking matters into their own hands, beginning with long-neglected island residents no stranger to unique logistical challenges.

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Islesboro Maine

‘It’s A Story Of Perseverance’

Martinsville, Virginia To Finally Take Full Advantage Of Decades-Old Muni Fiber Network

Martinsville, Virginia has technically owned a municipal fiber network for the better part of a generation. But the city never had the time, resources, or interest in maximizing the Municipal Internet Network’s (MINet) full potential until COVID demonstrated the importance of affordable access and federal broadband grants made expansion a viable reality.

At a Martinsville city council meeting on February 13, the council offered unanimous support for a phased expansion of the city’s fiber network.

What exactly the expansion will look like, and how it will be funded, very much remain a work in progress.

The core MINet fiber network originally consisted of 48 strands and 20 miles of fiber connecting city schools, municipal buildings, local businesses, and key anchor institutions. A 2009 estimate indicates the network has saved the city between $100,000 and $150,000 annually on telecom lease agreements every year since its inception.

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Martinsville map

Despite having been first constructed in the 1990s, Martinsville’s MINet only has about 376 customers (98 of them being residential) in a city of nearly 14,000 residents. There’s roughly 20 users currently on a multi-month waiting list, eager to get access to affordable fiber at speeds up to a gigabit per second (Gbps).

Mike Scaffidi has been the MINet director for 26 years. He tells ILSR that while the city has contemplated network expansion for a long time, the city never had the staff or resources to prioritize the expansion or marketing of the city-owned fiber network.

Ottawa County, Michigan Strikes $25 Million Partnership With 123Net

Ottawa County, Michigan officials say they’ve struck a new public private partnership (PPP) with 123Net on a $25 million fiber deployment that aims to bring more uniform – and affordable – broadband access to Michigan’s seventh largest county by population.

The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners voted last month to approve a master agreement and letter of intent with 123Net.

The finalized agreement calls for 123Net to spend two years deploying 400 miles of new fiber infrastructure as part of an open access, carrier neutral fiber network to bring new competition – and affordable fiber – to 10,000 county residents and businesses.

The $25 million network will be funded by $14 million from Michigan’s Realizing Opportunity with Broadband Infrastructure Networks (ROBIN) grant program; $7.5 million from Ottawa County’s American Rescue Plan Act funds, and $3.5 million in private funding from 123NET.

“We’re at an interesting time in broadband deployment as there are a number of unique funding programs that counties and municipalities can access,” said Chuck Irvin, Executive Vice President of 123NET, said in a statement. “123NET is proud to be part of this exciting project.”

At the same time, county officials say they’ve struck a separate deal with Tilson Technology to build new wireless towers to deliver fixed wireless service to an undetermined number of rural county residents for whom deploying fiber is cost prohibitive.

Golden, Colorado Strikes Right Of Way Agreement With Google Fiber

Golden, Colorado has struck a new right-of-way agreement with Google Fiber that should expedite the competitive delivery of affordable fiber to the city of 20,000.

The deal gives Google Fiber non-exclusive access to public right-of-way to build a commercial broadband network, though it delivers no guarantee of uniform access across the entire city.

In a memo to the Golden City Council, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer Jiles McCoy said the city’s new agreement “would act as a template for any future companies wishing to build broadband services in the Golden right of way.”

The move comes after years of discussion in the city as to how to improve local broadband competition, reduce prices, and expand affordable access.

In 2016, Golden residents voted to opt out of a now defunct state law, ghost written by regional broadband monopolies, restricting the construction and operation of community owned and operated broadband networks. Last year Colorado leaders finally eliminated the law completely, opening the door to greater expansion of community-owned networks.

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In 2019 the city completed a feasibility study showing that the construction of a full city-owned fiber network would cost $37 million. Instead of tackling the entire project at once, advisers recommended the city proceed in phases, beginning with the construction of a $3.8 million, 10.5 mile fiber ring connecting key community anchor institutions.