
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Back in 2021, ILSR noted that government leaders across Virginia had forged a partnership with a local private ISP and several nearby cooperatives to finally expand affordable, next-generation fiber into long unserved portions of eight predominantly rural Virginia counties.
Three years later and the partnership doesn’t appear to be working out all that well for Augusta County, with numerous county officials bickering about a lack of transparency and a conspicuous lack of deployment progress.
The original coalition involved Rappahannock Electric Cooperative (REC), the Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC), All Points Broadband, and Dominion Energy Virginia collaborating to bring fiber to unserved parts of Augusta, Clarke, Fauquier, Frederick, Page, Rappahannock, Rockingham, and Warren counties.
But recent reporting by the Augusta Free Press and the News Leader indicates that the Augusta County Board of Supervisors and the county administrator, Tim Fitzgerald, are increasingly fighting over what they say is a lack of any progress, and a lack of transparency between county agencies and the company.
All Points Broadband originally claimed it would have 267 miles of new fiber optic cable installed in Augusta County by the end of the 2024 calendar year. That hasn’t happened yet, and nobody appears to know why.
Communication between members of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors and members of the board of directors of the Augusta County Service Authority appear strained, at best. All Points Broadband seems to have met at least once with the Augusta County Service Authority, but, according to local reporting, nobody informed the board, or maintained meeting minutes.
“It’s a professional courtesy that the members of the board be kept informed,” South River Supervisor Carolyn Bragg said of the impasse. “I thought everybody knew about the All Points visit. I don’t know why we wouldn’t have. Why wouldn’t you tell this whole board? Why wouldn’t you let them know this was going on? I mean, broadband affects all of us.”
All Points Broadband did not respond to a request for comment on the delays or complaints about a lack of transparency.
All Points remains active in other parts of Virginia, having just broken ground on a Hanover County deployment and lighting up a fiber network at the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County.
ILSR has long noted how public private partnerships (PPP) may be appealing to municipalities that feel they lack the funds or expertise to deploy their own broadband networks. But such partnerships can result in less control of the finished network, network changes, and consumer and business facing pricing – especially if locals don’t own the finished network.
That said, Virginia remains one of 16 states that have passed counterproductive laws, usually ghost written by regional telecom monopolies, that restrict or outright ban local communities from building or expanding their own broadband networks.
Virginia’s law doesn’t ban municipal broadband outright, but does saddle municipalities with numerous onerous operational and reporting restrictions that regional incumbents don’t face, including penalties for charging lower prices than large regional monopolies.
Inline map of Augusta County courtesy of GetArchives, Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal
Inline image of Augusta County Courthouse courtesy of Chris Dilworth on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Genericc